
ALFRED TENNYSON 
From a photograph by the Autotype Company, London 



RECORDS OF 



Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning 



ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE 



/ have written /rafik/y, garrulously , and at ease, speaking of what 
gives me joy to renteutber at aiiy length I like ; sometimes very carefully 
of what I think may be usefil for others to knoiu, and passing over in 
total silence things which I have no pleasure in reviewing. — Pk.'F.terita 



ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1892 



oc 



,1* >^ 






Copyright, 1892, by Hari'er & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 



/Z'3^030 



" Miiiil lliat there i,s always a certain laclicl about great men — tlie\' 
speak of cDiiimon life more largely and generously than common men 
do — they regard the world with u manlier countenance, and see its real 
features more fairly than the timid shufflers who only dare to look up 
at life through blinkers, or to have an oi)inion when there is a crowd 
to back it." — Etti^lish I/unioris/s. 

" ' I remember poor ijyron, llobhouse, Trelawney, and myself, 
dining with Cardinal Mezzocaldo at Rome,' Captain Sumph began, 
' and we had some Orvieto wine for dinner, which Byron liked very 
much. And I remember how the Cardinal regretted that he was a 
single man. We went to Civita Vecchia two days afterwards where 
Byron's yacht was — and, by Jove, the Cardinal died within three weeks, 
and Byron was very sorry for he rather liked him.' 

"'A devilish interesting story, indeed,' Wagg said. 'You should 
publish some of these stories. Captain Sumph, you really should,' 
.Sliandon said." — /'nidcniiis. 



/.■f 



Tf) 

HELENA FAUCIT. LADY MARTIN 

AND lO 

SIR THEODORE MARTIN, K.C.B. 

S)e^lcatc^ 

WITH OI.J) AKFKCTION AND 
KKMEMBRANCE 

Iitli May, i8f)2 

Jmo(;p;n. " 'Mongst Friends" 

Cviiihrliiir, III. \ I. 



r; 



CONTENTS 



PACE 

ALFRED TENNYSON i 

JOHN RUSKIN . . 6i 

ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT DROWNING 127 



LLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

Alfred Tennyson Frontispiece 

Tennyson's Birthplace, Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire 

Mrs. Tennyson 

Tennyson's Children 
Clevedon Court .... 
The Meeting of the Severn and Wye 
Caerleon upon Usk .... 
Burleigh House, by Stamford Town 

Almesbury 

Isle of Wight 



" Maud" 



Farringford House, 

In the New Forest 

Tennyson Reading 

Farringford Beacon . 

The Oak Lawn, Aldworth 

The Edge of Blackdown, Showing Tennyson's 

Tennyson's Home at Aldworth, Surrey 

The Tennyson Coat of Arms 

Brantwood 

John Ruskin 

Looking from Brantwood Towards the Head of 

Lake 

The Turret Room — Ruskin's Bedroom 
Coniston — Old Hall and Old Man 
Entrance to Brantwood ■ 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning . 
Robert Browning .... 
Mrs. Browning's Tomb at Florence 
Mr. Milsand 



House 



Coniston 



5 
9 
15 
19 
24 
27 
30 
33 
37 
41 
45 
47 
49 
53 
57 
60 

63 

71 

75 
79 
85 
91 
133 
141 

i5r 

159 



ALFRED TENNYSON 



b 



< ^^:^^ 



"// footfall there 
Suffices to upturn to the warm air 
Half germinating spices ; mere decaf 
Troduces richer life ; and dav by day 
New pollen on the I ih- petal grows, 
y^iid still more labyrinthine buds the rose.'' 

SORDELLO. 



I 



THERE is a place called Somersby in Lincolnshire, 
where an old white rectory stands on the slope of a 
hill, and the winding lanes are shadowed by tall ashes and 
elm-trees, and where two brooks meet at the bottom of the 
glebe field. It is a place far away from us in silence and in 
distance, lying upon the " ridged wolds." They bound the 
horizon of the rectory garden, whence they are to be seen 
flowing to meet the sky. I have never known Somersby, 
but I have often heard it described, and the pastoral country 
all about, and the quiet, scattered homes. One can picture 
the rectory to one's self with something of a monastic sweet- 
ness and quiet; an ancient Norman cross is standing in the 
church-yard, and perhaps there is still a sound in the air of 
the bleating of fiocks. It all comes before one as one reads 
the sketch of Tennyson's native place in the Homes and 
Haunts of the British Poets: the village not far from the 
fens, "in a pretty pastoral district of softly sloping hills and 
large ash-trees. . . . The little glen in the neighborhood is 
called by the old monkish name of Holywell." Lord Tenny- 
son sometimes speaks of this glen, which he remembers 
white with snow-drops in their season ; and who will not 
recall the exquisite invocation : 

"Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side, 
The seven elms, the poplars four 
That stand beside my father's d(;or, 

3 



And chiefly from the brook that loves 

To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, 

Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves. ... 

O ! hither lead thy feet ! 
Pour round mine ears the livelong beat 
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds, 

Upon the ridged wolds." 

The wind that goes blowing where it listeth, once, in the 
early beginning of this century, came sweeping through the 
garden of this old Lincolnshire rectory, and, as the wind 
blew, a sturdy child of five years old with shining locks stood 
opening his arms upon the blast and letting himself be blown 
along, and as he travelled on he made his first line of poetry 
and said, " I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind,'" and 
he tossed his arms, and the gust whirled on, sweeping into 
the great abyss of winds. One might, perhaps, still trace in 
the noble, familiar face of our Poet Laureate the features of 
this child, one of many deep-eyed sons and daughters born 
in the quiet rectory among the elm-trees. 

Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August, 1809. 
He has heard many and many a voice calling to him since 
the time when he listened to the wind as he played alone 
in his father's garden, or joined the other children at their 
games and jousts. They were a noble little clan of poets 
and of knights, coming of a knightly race, with castles' to 
defend, with mimic tournaments to fight. Somersby was so 
far away from the world, so behindhand in its echoes (which 
must have come there softened through all manner of green 
and tranquil things, and, as it were, hushed into pastoral 
silence), that though the early part of the century was stir- 
ring with the clang of legions, few of its rumors seem to 
have reached the children. They never heard at the time 
of the battle of Waterloo. They grew up together playing 
their own games, living their own life ; and where is such 



> c 



— c 




life to be found as that of a happy, eager family of boys and 
girls before Doubt, the steps of Time, the shocks of Chance, 
the blows of Death, have come to dim or shake their creed ? 

These handsome children had beyond most children that 
wondrous toy at their command which some people call 
imagination. The boys played great games like Arthur's 
knights ; they were champions and warriors defending a 
stone heap, or again they would set up opposing camps with 
a king in the midst of each. The king was a willow wand 
stuck into the ground, with an outer circle of immortals to 
defend him of firmer, stiffer sticks. Then each party would 
come with stones, hurling at^each other's king, and trying to 
overthrow him. Perhaps as the day wore on they became 
romancers, leaving the jousts deserted. When dinner-time 
came, and they all sat round the table, each in turn put a 
chapter of his story underneath the potato-bowl — long, end- 
less stories, chapter after chapter diffuse, absorbing, unend- 
ing, as are the histories of real life ; some of these romances 
were in letters, like Clarissa Harlowe. Alfred used to tell 
a story which lasted for months, and which was called "The 
Old Horse." 

Alfred's first verses, so I once heard him say, were written 
upon a slate which his brother Charles put into his hand one 
Sunday at Louth, when all the elders of the party were go- 
ing into church, and the child was left alone. Charles gave 
him a subject — the flowers in the garden — and when he 
came back from church little Alfred brought the slate to his 
brother all covered with written lines of blank verse. They 
were made on the model of Thomson's Seasons, the only 
poetry he had ever read. One can picture it all to one's 
self : the flowers in the garden, the verses, the little poet 
with waiting eyes, and the young brother scanning the lines. 
"Yes, you can write," said Charles, and he gave Alfred back 
the slate. 

7 



1 have also heard another story of his grandfather, later 
on, asking him to write an elegy on his grandmother, who 
had recently died, and when it was written, putting ten shil- 
lings into his hands and saying, " There, that is the first 
money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take my 
word for it, it will be the last." 

The Tennysons are a striking example of the theory of 
family inheritance. Alfred was one of twelve children, of 
whom the eldest, Frederick, who was educated at Eton, is 
known as the author of very imaginative poems. Charles 
was the second son, and Alfred was the third. Charles 
and little Alfred were sent for a few years to the Grammar 
School at Louth, where the Laureate was not happy, al- 
though he still remembers walking adorned with blue rib- 
bons in a procession for the proclamation of the corona- 
tion of George the Fourth. The old wives said at the time 
that the boys made the prettiest part of the show. 

Charles Tennyson — Charles Turner he was afterwards 
called, for he took the name with a property which he in- 
herited — was Alfred's special friend and brother. In his 
own most sweet degree, Charles Tenn3'son too was a true 
poet. Who that has ever read his sonnets will cease to love 
them ? His brother loves and quotes them with affection. 
Coleridge loved them ; James Spedding, wise critic, life-long 
friend, read them with unaltered delight from his youth to 
his much-honored age. In an introductory essay to a volume 
of the collected sonnets, published after Charles Turner's 
death, Mr. Spedding quotes the picture of a summer's day- 
break : 

" But one sole star, none other anywhere ; 
A wild-rose odour from the fields was borne ; 
The lark's mysterious joy filled earth and air, 
And from the wind's top met the hunter's horn ; 
The aspen trembled wildly; and the morn 
Breathed up in rosy clouds divinely fair." 




MRS. TENNYSON 
After the painting at Aldworth by G. I-. Watts, R.A. 



Charles Tennyson was in looks not unlike his younger 
brother. He was stately, too, though shorter in stature, 
gentle, spiritual, very noble, simple. I once saw him kneel- 
ing in a church, and only once again. He was like some- 
thing out of some other world, more holy, more silent than 
that in which most of us are living ; there is a picture in 
the National Gallery of St. Jerome which always recalls 
him to me. The sons must have inherited their poetic gifts 
from their father. He was the Rev. George Clayton Ten- 
nyson, LL.D., a tall, striking, and impressive man, full of 
accomplishments and parts, a strong nature, high-souled, 
high -tempered. He was tjie head of the old family; but 
his own elder-brother share of its good things had passed 
by will into the hands of another branch, which is still 
represented by the Tennysons d'Eyncourt. Perhaps be- 
fore he died he may have realized that to one of his had 
come possessions greater than any ever yet entailed by 
lawyer's deeds — an inheritance, a priceless Benjamin's por- 
tion, not to be measured or defined. 



n 



.Alfred Tennyson, as he grew up towards manhood, 
found other and stronger inspirations than Thomson's gen- 
tle Seasons. B3'ron's spell had fallen on his generation, and 
for a boy of genius it must have been absolute and overmas- 
tering. Tennyson was soon to find his own voice, but mean- 
while he began to write like Byron. He produced poems 
and verses in endless abundance : trying his wings, as peo- 
ple say, before starting on his own strong flight. One day 
the news came to the village— the dire news which spread 



across the land, filling men's hearts with consternation— 
that Byron was dead. Alfred was then a boy about fifteen. 

" Byron was dead ! I thought the whole world was at an 
end," he once said, speaking of these by-gone days. " I 
thought everything was over and finished for every one — 
that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out 
alone, and carved ' Byron is dead' into the sandstone." 

I have spoken of Tennyson from the account of an old 
friend, whose recollections go back to those days, which 
seem perhaps more distant to us than others of earlier date 
and later fashion. Mrs. Tennyson, the mother of the family, 
so this same friend tells me, was a sweet and gentle and 
most imaginative woman , so kind-hearted that it had pass- 
ed into a proverb, and the wicked inhabitants of a neigh- 
boring village used to bring their dogs to her windows and 
beat them in order to be bribed to leave off by the gentle 
lady, or to make advantageous bargains by selling her the 
worthless curs. She was intensely, fervently religious, as a 
poet's mother should be. After her husband's death (he 
had added to the rectory, and made it suitable for his large 
family) she still lived on at Somersby with her children and 
their friends. The daughters were growing up, the elder 
sons were going to college. Frederick, the eldest, went first 
to Trinity, Cambridge, and his brothers followed him there 
in turn. Life was opening for them, they were seeing new 
aspects and places, making new friends, and bringing them 
home to their Lincolnshire rectory. In Alemoriavi gives 
many a glimpse of the old home, of which the echoes still 
reach us across half a century. 

"O sound to rout the brood of cares, 
The sweep of scythe in morning dew, 
The gust that round the garden flew, 
And tumbled half the mellowing pears ! 



O bliss, when all in circle drawn 

About him, heart and ear were fed 

To hear him, as he lay and read 
The Tuscan poets on the lawn : 

Or in the all-golden afternoon 
A guest, or happy sister, sung, 
Or here she brought the harp and flung 

A ballad to the brightening moon." 

Dean Garden was one of those guests here spoken of, 
who with Arthur Hallam, the reader of the Tuscan poets, 
and James Spedding and ©thers, used to gather upon the 
lawn at Somersby — the young men and women in the hght 
of their youth and high spirits, the widowed mother leading 
her quiet life within the rectory walls. Was it not a happy 
sister herself who in after-days once described how, on a 
lovely summer night, they had all sat up so late talking in 
the starlight that the dawn came shining unawares; but the 
young tnen, instead of going to bed, then and there set off 
for a long walk across the hills in the sunrise. 

"And suck'd from out the distant gloom 
A breeze began to tremble o'er 
The large leaves of the sycamore,* 
And fluctuate all the still perfume, 

And gathering freshlier overhead, 

Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung 
The heavy-folded rose, and flung 

The lilies to and fro, and said 

'The dawn, the dawn,' and died away; 
And East and West, without a breath, 
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, 
'i"o broaden into boundless day." 

* I am told that the sycamore has been cut down, and the lawn is altered to another 
shape. 

'3 



Ill 



One thing which cannot fail to strike us when we are 
looking over the records of these earlier days is the remark- 
able influence which Alfred Tennyson seems to have had 
from the very first upon his contemporaries, even before his 
genius had been recognized by the rest of the world. Not 
only those of his own generation, but his elders and masters 
seem to have felt something of this. I remember hearing 
one of Tennyson's oldest friends, Dr. Thompson, the late 
Master of Trinity, say that " Whewell, who was a man him- 
self, and who knew a man when he saw him,'' used to pass 
over in Alfred Tennyson certain informalities and forget- 
fulness of combinations as to gowns, and places, and times, 
which in another he would never have overlooked. 

Whewell ruled a noble generation — a race of men born 
in the beginning of the century, whose praise and loyal 
friendship were indeed worth having, and whose good opin- 
ion Tennyson himself may have been proud to possess. 
Wise, sincere, and witty, these contemporaries spoke with au- 
thorit}', with the moderation of conscious strength. Those 
of this race that I have known in later days — for they were 
many of them my father's friends also — have all been men 
of unmistakable stamp, of great culture, of a certain digni- 
fied bearing, and of independence of mind and of nature. 

Most of them have succeeded in life as men do who are 
possessed of intellect and high character. Some have not 
made the less mark upon their time because their names are 
less widely known ; but each name is a memorable chapter 




Tn:N'N\'SfiN S CHII.DKEN 

After the painting at Alilworth l.y (.. 1-. Watts, R.A. 



in life to one and another of us who remember them. One 
of those old friends, who also loved my father, and whom 
he loved, who has himself passed away ; one who saw life 
with Ills own eyes, and spoke with his own words has de- 
scribed Tennyson in his youth, in a fragment which is a 
remembrance, a sort of waking dream, of some by-gone days 



and talks. How many of us might have been glad to listen 
to our poet, and to the poet who has made the philosophy 
of Omar Kha,yam known to the world, as they discoursed 
together ; of life, of boyish memories, of books, and again 
more books; of chivalry — mainly but another name for 
youth — of a possible old age, so thoroughly seasoned with 
its spirit that all the experience of the world should serve 
not to freeze but to direct the genial current of the soul ! 
and who that has known them both will not recognize the 
truth of this description of Alfred in early days ? 

" A man at all points, of grand proportion and feature, significant of 
that inward chivalry becoming his ancient and honorable race ; when 
himself a ' Yonge Squire,' like him in Chancer, ' of grete strength,' that 
could hurl the crowbar farther than any of the neighboring clowns, whose 
humors, as well as of their betters — knight, squire, landlord, and lieu- 
tenant — he took quiet note of, like Chaucer himself ; like Wordsworth on 
the mountain, he too when a lad abroad on the world, sometimes of a 
night with the shepherd, watching not only the flock on the greensward, 
but also 

' the fleecy star that bears 
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas,' 

along with those other Zodiacal constellations which Aries, I think, leads 
over the field of heaven." 

Arthur Hallam has also written of him in some lines to R. 
J. 'Pennant of 

"a friend, a rare one, 
A noble being full of clearest insight, 

. . . whose fame 
Is couching now with jiantherized intent, 
As who shall say, I'll spring to him anon. 
And have him for my own." 

All these men could understand each other, although they 
had not then told the world their secrets. Poets, critics, 



men of learning — such names as Trench and Monckton 
Milnes, George Stovin Venables, the Lushingtons and 
Kinglake, need no comment ; many more there are, and 
deans and canons — a band of youthful friends in those days 
meeting to hold debate 

" on mind and art, 

And labor, and the changing mart, 
And all the framework of the land ; 
When one would aim an arrow fair. 

But send it slackly from the string ; 

And one would pierce an outer ring, 
And one an inner, Jjere and there ; 

And last the master-bowman, he. 
Would cleave the mark." 

The lines to J. S. were written to one of these earlier 
associates. 

"And gently comes tlie world to those 
That are cast in gentle mould." 

It was the prophecy of a whole lifetime. There were but few 
signs of age in James Spedding's looks, none in his charm- 
ing companionship, when the accident befell him which took 
him away from those who loved him. To another old com- 
panion, the Rev. W. H. Brookfield, is dedicated that sonnet 
which flows like an echo of Cambridge chimes on a Sabbath 

morning. 

B 17 



IV 



It is in this sonnet to W. H. Brookfield that Tennyson 
writes of Arthur Hallam : " Him the lost light of those dawn- 
golden days." 

Arthur Hallam was the same age as my own father, and 
born in 1811. When he died he was but twenty-three; 
but he had lived long enough to show what his life might 
have been. 

In the preface to a little volume of his collected poems 
and essays, published some time after his death, there is a 
pathetic introduction. " He seemed to tread the earth as 
a spirit from some better world," writes his father; and a 
correspondent, who is, as I have been told, Arthur Hallam's 
and Tennyson's common friend, Mr. Gladstone, says, with 
deep feeling : "It has pleased God that in his death, as well 
as in his life and nature, he should be marked beyond 
ordinary men. When much time has elapsed, when most 
bereavements will be forgotten, he will still be remembered, 
and his place, I fear, will be felt to be still vacant ; singularly 
as his mind was calculated by its native tendencies to work 
powerfully and for good, in an age full of import to the 
nature and destinies of man." 

How completely these words have been carried out must 
strike us all now. The father lived to see the young man's 
unconscious influence working through his friend's genius, 
and reaching whole generations unborn. A lad}-, speaking 
of Arthur Hallam after his death, said to Tennyson, "I think 
he was perfect." " And so he was," said Lord Tennyson. 




\]\ ^r-t::^^#f 



ill fSySr^^W^n 










"as near perfection as a mortal man can be." Arthur 
Hallam was a man of remarkable intellect. He could take 
in the most difficult and abstruse ideas with an extraordinary 
rapidity and insight. On one occasion he began to work 
one afternoon, and mastered a difficult book of Descartes at 
a single sitting. In the preface to the Alemorials Mr. Hallam 
speaks of this peculiar clearness of perception and facility 
for acquiring knowledge ; but, above all, the father dwells 
on his son's undeviating sweetness of disposition and ad- 
herence to his sense of what was right. In the Quarterlies 
and Reviews of the time, his opinion is quoted here and 
there with a respect which shows in what esteem it was 
already held. 

At the time when Arthur Hallam died he was engaged to 
be married to a sister of the poet's. She was scarcely seven- 
teen at the time. One of the sonnets addressed by Arthur 
Hallam to his betrothed was written when he began to 
teach her Italian : 

" Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome, 

Ringing with echoes of Italian song ; 

Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong, 
And all the pleasant place is like a home. 
Hark, on the right, with full piano tone. 

Old Dante's voice encircles all the air ; 

Hark, yet again, lii<e flute-tones mingling rare 
Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan. 
Pass thou the lintel freely ; without fear 

Feast on the music. I do better know thee 

Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me 
Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear 

That element whence thou must draw thy life — 

An English maiden and an English wife." 

As we read the pages of this little book we come upon 
more than one happy moment saved out of the past, hours 



of delight and peaceful friendship, saddened by no fore- 
boding, and complete in themselves. 

"Alfred, I would that you beheld me now. 
Sitting beneath an ivied, mossy wall. 

. . . Above my head 
Dilates immeasurable a wild of leaves. 
Seeming received into the blue expanse 
That vaults the summer noon." 

There is something touching in the tranquil ring of the 
voice calling out in the summer noontide with all a young 
man's expansion. 

It seemed to be, but the beginning of a beautiful happy 
life, when suddenly the end came. Arthur Hallam was 
travelling with his father in Austria when he died very sud- 
denly, with scarce a warning sign of illness. Mr. Hallam 
had come home and found his son, as he supposed, sleep- 
ing upon a couch ; but it was death, not sleep. " Those 
whose eyes must long be dim with tears " — so writes the 
heart-stricken father — "brought him home to rest among 
his kindred and in his own country." They chose his rest- 
ing-place in a tranquil spot on a lone hill that overhangs the 
Bristol Channel. He was buried in the chancel of Cleve- 
don Church, in Somerset, by Clevedon Court, which had 
been the early home of his mother, an Elton by birth. 

In all England there is not a sweeter place than the 
sunny old Court upon the hill, with its wide prospects and 
grassy terraces, where Arthur Hallam must have played in 
his childhood, whence others of his kindred, touched with 
his own bright and beautiful spirit, have come forth. 

When Mr. Hallam, after a life of repeated sorrows, at last 
went to his rest with his wife and his children, it was Alfred 
Tennyson who wrote his epitaph, which may still be read in 
the chancel of the old Clevedon Church. ♦ 



V 



Once in their early youth we hear of the two friends, 
Tennyson and Hallam, traveUing in the Pyrenees. This 
was at the time of the war of Spanish independence, when 
many generous young men went over with funds and good 
energies to help the cause of liberty. These two were tak- 
ing money and letters written in invisible ink to certain 
conspirators who were then revolting against the intolerable 
tyranny of Ferdinand, and who were chiefly hiding in the 
Pyrenees. The young men met, among others, a Senor 
Ojeda, who confided to Tennyson his intentions, which were 
to toupcr la gorge a tous Ics cures. Seiior Ojeda could not talk 
English or fully explain all his aspirations. '^Mais tous con- 
naissez vion coeur,''' said he, effusively; and a pretty black 
one it is, thought the poet. I have heard Tennyson described 
in those days as "straight and with a broad breast," and 
when he had crossed over from the Continent and was com- 
ing back, walking through Wales, he went one day into a 
little way-side inn, where an old man sat by the fire, who 
looked up, and asked many questions. "Are you from the 
army ? Not from the army ? Then where do you come 
from?" said the old man. "I am just come from the Pyre- 
nees," said Alfred. "Ah, I knew there was a something," 
said the wise old man. 

John Kemble was among those who had gone over to 
Spain, and one day a rumor came to distant Somersby that 
he was to be tried for his life by the Spanish authorities. No 
one else knew much about him except Alfred Tennyson, who 

23 




THE MEHTING OF THE SEVERN AND WYE. 



Started before dawn to drive across the country in search of 
some person of authority who knew the Consul at Cadiz, and 
who could send letters of protection to the poor prisoner. 

It was a false alarm. John Kemble came home to make 
a name for himself in other fields. Meanx'I'hile Alfred Ten- 

24 



nyson's own reputation was growing, and when the first two 
volumes of his collected poems were published in 1842, fol- 
lowed by The Princess, in 1847, his fame spread throughout 
the land. 

Some of the reviews were violent and antagonistic at first. 
One especially had tasted blood, and the " Hang, draw, and 
Quarterly" as it has been called, of those days, having late- 
ly cut up Endymion, now proceeded to demolish Tennyson. 

But this was a passing phase. It is curious to note the 
sudden change in the tone of the criticisms — the absolute 
surrender of these knights of the pen to the irresistible and 
brilliant advance of the unknown and visored warrior. The 
visor is raised now, the face is familiar to us all, and the 
arms, though tested in a hundred fights, are shining and un- 
conquered still. 

William Howitt, whom we have already quoted, has writ- 
ten an article upon the Tennyson of these earlier days. It 
is fanciful, suggestive, full of interest, with a gentle myste- 
rious play and tender appreciation. Speaking of the poet 
himself, he asks, with the rest of the world at that time : 
" You may hear his voice, but where is the man .'' He is 
wandering in some dream-land, beneath the shade of old 
and charmed forests, by far-off shores, where 

' all night 
Tlie plun<;ing seas draw I)ack\vard from the land 
Their moon-led waters white ; 

by the old mill-dam, thinking of the merry miller and his 
pretty daughter ; or wandering over the open wolds where 

' Norland whirlwinds blow.' 

From all these places — from the silent corridor of an an- 
cient convent, from some shrine where a devoted knight re- 
cites his vows, from the drear monotony of * the moated 



grange,' or the forest beneath the 'talking oak' — comes the 
voice of Tennyson, rich, dreamy, passionate, yet not impa- 
tient, musical with the airs of chivalrous ages, yet mingling 
in his song the theme and the spirit of those that are yet 
to come." . . . 

This article was written many years ago, when but the 
first chords had sounded, before the glorious Muse, passing 
beyond her morning joy, had met with the sorrow of life. 
13ut it is well that as we travel on through later, sadder 
scenes we should still carry in our hearts this romantic 
music. One must be English born, I think, to know how 
English is the spell which this great enchanter casts over 
us; the very spirit of the land falls upon us as the visions 
he evokes come closing round. Whether it is the moated 
grange he shows us, or Locksley Hall that in the dis- 
tance overlooks the sandy tracts, or Dora standing in the 
corn, or the sight of the brimming wave that swings 
through quiet meadows round the mill, it is all home in its 
broadest, sweetest aspect. 

It would not be easy for a generation that has grown up 

to the music of Tennyson, that has in a manner beaten 

time to it with the pulse of its Irfe, to imagine what the 

world would be without it. Even the most original among 

us must needs think of things more or less in the shape in 

which they come before us. The mystery of the charm of 

words is as great as that by which a wonder of natural 

beauty comes around us, and lays hold of our imagination. 

It may be fancy, but I for one feel as if summer-time could 

scarcely be summer without the song of the familiar green 

books. 

26 



VI 



In Memoriam, with music in its cantos, belonging to the 
school of all men's sad hearts, rings the awful DeProfimdis 
of death, faced and realized as far as may be by a human 
soul. It came striking ^uddenly into all the sweet ideal 
beauty and lovely wealth which had gone before, with a 
revelation of that secret of life which is told to each of us 
in turn by the sorrow of its own soul. Nothing can be 
more simple than the form of the poem as it flows. 

"Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
Their wings in tears, and skim away," 

as the poet says himself, but it is something else besides — 
something which has given words and ease to many of 
those who in their lonely frozen grief perhaps feel that 
they are no longer quite alone, when such a voice as this 
can reach them : 

' ' Peace ; come away : the song of woe 
Is after all an earthly song ; 
Peace ; come away : we do him wrong 
To sing so wildly : let us go." 

And as the cry passes away, come signs of peace and dawn- 
ing light : 

"Be neither song, nor game, nor feast; 

Nor harp be touch'd, nor flute be blown ; 
No dance, no motion, save alone 
What lightens in the lucid east 
29 



"Of rising worlds by yonder wood. 

Long sleeps the summer in the seed ; 
Run out your measured arcs, and lead 
The closing cycle rich in good." 

And the teacher who can read the great book of nature in- 
terprets for us as he turns the page. 

With In Mcmoriam, which was not published till 1850, 
Alfred Tennyson's fame was firmly established ; and when 




'^'^9?, 



BURLEIGH HOUSE, BY STAMFORD TOWN 



Wordsworth died (on Shakespeare's day in that same 3^ear) 
its author was appointed by the Queen Poet Laureate. 
There is a story* that at the time Sir Robert Peel was con- 
sulted he had never read any Tennyson, but he read "Ulys- 
ses " and warmed up, and acknowledged the right of this 
new-come poet to be England's Laureate. 

The home at Somersby was broken up by this time, by 



* See Lord Houghtem's Memoirs. 



marriages and other family events. Alfred Tennyson had 
come to live in London. He was poor; he had in turn to 
meet that struggle with wholesome poverty which brings the 
vagueness of genius into contact with reality, and teaches, 
better, perhaps, than any other science, the patience, the for- 
bearance, and knowledge of life which belong to it. 

The Princess, with all her lovely court and glowing har- 
monies, had been born in London, among the fogs and 
smuts of Lincoln's Inn, although, like all works of true art, 
this poem must have grown by degrees in other times and 
places as the poet came and went, free, unshackled, medi- 
tating, inditing. He says that " Tears, Idle Tears," was sug- 
gested by Tintern Abbey : but who shall define by what 
mysterious wonder of beauty and regret, by what sense of 
the "transient with the abiding?" 

In Memoriam was followed by the first part of the Idylls, 
and the record of the court King Arthur held at Camelot, 
and at "old Caerleon upon Usk" on that eventful Whitsun- 
tide when Prince Geraint came quickly flashing through the 
shallow ford to the little knoll, where the queen stood with 
her maiden, and 

. . . " listen'd for the distant hunt, 
And chiefly for the baying of Cavall." 

If It Memoriam is the record of a human soul, the Idylls 
mean the history, not of one man or of one generation, but 
of a whole cycle, of the faith of a nation failing and falling 
away into darkness. The first " Idyll " and the last, I have 
heard Lord Tennyson say, are intentionally more archaic 
than the others. "The whole is the dream of man coming 
into practical life, and ruined by one sin." Birth is a mys- 
tery, and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the table- 
land of life, and its struggle and performance. 

The poet once told us that the song of the knights march- 



ing past the King at the marriage of Arthur was made one 
spring afternoon on Clapham Common as he walked along. 

"Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May; 
Blow trumpet, the long night hath roll'd away! 
Blow through the living world — 'Let the King reign.'" 

So sang the young knights in the first bright days of early 
chivalry. 

"Clang battle-axe, and clash brand! Let the King reign. 
The King will follow Christ, and we the King." 

And then when the doom of evil spread, bringing not sor- 
row alone, but destruction in its train, not death only, but 
hopelessness and consternation, the song is finally changed 
into an echo of strange woe ; we hear no shout of triumph, 
but the dim shocks of battle, 

" the crash 
Of battle-axe on shatter'd helms, and shrieks 
After the Christ, of those who falling down 
Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist." 

All is over with the fair court ; Guinevere's golden head 
is low ; she has fled to Almesbury — 

"Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald. 
And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald 
Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan : 
And in herself she moan'd, ' Too late, too late !' 
Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn, 
A blot in heaven, the Raven, frying high, 
Croak'd, and she thought, ' He spies a field of death.'" 

And finally comes the conclusion, and the " Passing of 
Arthur," and he vanishes as he came, in mystery, silently 
floating away upon the barge towards the East, whence all 
religions are said to come. 

32 





- .1.1 ■'■^ 



,*■',■ 'I' ^^ 



As the writer notes down these various fragments of re- 
membrance, and compiles this sketch of present things, she 
cannot but feel how much of the past it all means to 
her, and how very much her own feeling is an inheritance 
which has gathered interest during a lifetime, so that the 
chief claim of her words to be regarded is that they are 
those of an old friend. Her father's warmth of admiration 
comes back vividly as she writes, all his pleasure when he 
secured " Tithonus " for one of the early numbers of the 
Cornhill Magazine, his imniense and outspoken admiration 
for the Idylls of the King. 

I have heard them all speak of these London days when 
Alfred Tennyson lived in poverty with his friends and his 
golden dreams. He lived in the Temple, at 58 Lincoln's 
Inn Fields, and elsewhere. 

It was about this time that Carlyle introduced Sir John 
Simeon to Tennyson one night at Bath House, and made 
the often-quoted speech, "There he sits upon a dung-heap 
surrounded by innumerable dead dogs ;" by which dead 
dogs he meant " Qinone " and other Greek versions and 
adaptations. He had said the same thing of Landor and 
his Hellenics. " I was told of this," said Lord Tennyson, 
"and some time afterwards I repeated it to Carlyle: 'I'm 
told that is what you say of me.' He gave a kind of guf- 
faw. ' Eh, that wasn't a very luminous description of you,' 
he answered." 

The story is well worth retelling, so completely does it 
illustrate the grim humor and unaffected candor of a dys- 
peptic man of genius, who flung words and epithets without 
malice, who neither realized the pain his chance sallies 
might give, nor the indelible flash which branded them 
upon people's memories. 

The world has pointed its moral finger of late at the old 
man in his great old age, accusing himself in the face of all, 

35 



and confessing the overpowering irritations which the suf- 
fering of a lifetime had hiid upon him and upon her he 
loved. That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with an ill 
temper and a tender heart and a racking imagination, speak- 
ing from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of pas- 
sionate remorse which few among us dare to face, seems to 
some of us now a figure nobler and truer, a teacher greater 
far, than in the days when his pain and love and remorse 
were still hidden from us 5,11. 

Carlyle and Mr. Fitzgerald used to be often with Tenny- 
son at that time. They used to dine together at the " Cock " 
tavern in the Strand among other places ; sometimes Ten- 
nyson and Carlyle took long, solitary walks into the night. 

Here is Carlyle's description of the poet, written to Emer- 
son in America : 

"Tennyson came in to us on Sunday evening, a truly in- 
teresting Son of Earth and Son of Heaven. . , . One of the 
finest-looking men in the world. His voice is musical, me- 
tallic — fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that 
may be between ; speech and speculation free and plente- 
ous. I do not meet in these late decades such company 
over a pipe. ... A true human soul or some authentic ap- 
proximation thereto, to whom your soul can say. Brother; a 
man solitary and sad as certain men are, dwelling in an at- 
mosphere of gloom — carrying a bit of chaos about him, in 
short, which he is manufacturing into cosmos f' I have vent- 
ured to put the italics ; had I letters of gold to write with I 
would set them to the stately words. 

The other day a lady was describing a by-gone feast giv- 
en about this time by the poet to Lady Duff Gordon, and 
to another young and beautiful lady, a niece of Mr. Hallam's. 
Harry Hallam, his younger son, was also asked. Lord Ten- 
nyson, in his hospitality, had sent for a carpenter to change 
the whole furniture of his bedroom in order to prepare a 

36 



proper drawing-room for the ladies. Mr. Brookfield, com- 
ing in, was in time to suggest some compromise, to which 
the host reluctantly agreed. One can imagine that it was 
a delightful feast, but indeed it is always a feast-day when 
one breaks bread with those one loves, and the writer is 
glad to think that she, too, has been among those to sit at 
the kind board where the salt has not lost its savor in the 
years that have passed, and where the guests can say their 
grace not for bread and wine alone. May she add that 
the first occasion of her having the honor of breaking bread 
in company with Lord Tennyson was in her father's house, 
when she was propped up in a tall chair between her 
parents ? 



VII 



Some of the writer's earliest recollections are of days 
now long gone by, when many of these young men of whom 
she has been speaking, grown to be middle-aged, used to 
come from time to time to her father's house, and smoke 
with him, and talk and laugh quietly, taking life seriously, 
but humorously too, with a certain loyalty to others and 
self-respect which was their characteristic. They were 
somewhat melancholy men at soul ; but for that very rea- 
son, perhaps, the humors of life may have struck them 
more especially. It is no less possible that our children 
will think of us as cheerful folks upon the whole, with no 
little affectation of melancholy and all the graces. 

I can remember on one occasion through a cloud of 
smoke looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave 
head of the Poet Laureate. He was sitting with my father 
in the twilight after some family meal in the old house in 

39 



Kensington. It is Lord Tennyson himself who has re- 
minded me how upon this occasion, while my father was 
speaking, my little sister looked up suddenly from the book 
over which she had been absorbed, saying, in her sweet 
childish voice, " Papa, why do you not write books like 
Nicholas NicklebyV Then again I seem to hear, across 
that same familiar table, voices without shape or name, 
talking -and telling each other that Lord Tennyson was mar- 
ried — that he and his wife had been met walking on the 
terrace, at Clevedon Court; and then the clouds descend 
again, except, indeed, that I still see my father riding off 
on his brown cob to the Tennysons' house at Twickenham 
(Chapel House, which I can remember with its oak staircase 
and the carved figure of a bishop blessing the passers-by) 
to attend the christening of Hallam, their eldest son. In 
after-days we were shown the old ivy -grown church and 
the rectory at Shiplake, by the deep bend of the Thames, 
where their marriage took place, after long years of faithful 
constancy. 

It was at Somersby that Alfred Tennyson first became 
acquainted with his wife. She was eldest daughter of 
Henry Selwood, the last but one of a family of country 
gentlemen settled in Berkshire in the time of Charles I., 
and before that, in Saxon times, as it is said, more impor- 
tant people in the forest of their name. Her mother was a 
sister of Sir John Franklin. 

Not many years after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Tenny- 
son settled at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight. There is 
a photograph I have always liked, in which it seems to me 
the history of this home is written, as such histories should 
be written, in sunlight, in the flashing of a beam, in an 
instant, and forever. It was taken in the green glade at 
Farringford. Hallam and Lionel Tennyson stand on either 
side of their parents, the father and mother and children, 



hand in hand, come advancing towards us — who does not 
know the beautiful Hues to the mother : 

"Dear, near, and true — no truer Time liiniself 
Can prove you, thougli he make you evermore 
Dearer and nearer." 

And though years have passed in which the boys with 
their wind-blown locks grew up to man's estate, so that it 
is now their boys who are in turn picking the daffodils under 
the Farringford hedge, yet the old picture remains, in which 
that one dear remembered figure, so early carried by the 
flood far " from out our bourne of Time and Space," seems 
to shine brighter than the rest. 



viir 



One autumn, when everything seemed happy at home, 
Mrs. Cameron took me with her to Freshwater for a few de- 
lightful weeks, and then, for the first time, I lived with them 
all, and with kind Airs. Cameron, in the ivy-grown house 
near the gates of Farringford. For the first time I stayed 
in the island, and with the people who were dwelling there, 
and walked with Tennyson along High Down, treading the 
turf, listening to his talk, while the gulls came sideways, 
flashing their white breasts against the edge of the cliffs, and 
the poet's cloak flapped time to the gusts of the west wind. 

The house at Farringford itself seemed like a charmed 
palace, with green walls without, and speaking walls within. 
There hung Dante with his solemn nose and wreath ; Italy 
gleamed over the doorways ; friends' face's lined the pas- 

43 



sages ; books filled the shelves, and a glow of crimson was 
everywhere; the great oriel drawing-room window was full 
of green and golden leaves, of the soiuul of birds and of 
the distant sea. 

The very names of the j^eopie wiio have stooil u[)on the 
lawn at l'"arringforil woidd be an interesting study for some 
future biographer : Longfellow, Maiuice, Kingsley, the Duke 
of Argyll, Loeker, Dean Stanley, the Prince Consort. Good 
(larihaldi once planted a tree there, od which some too ar- 
dent republican broke a branch before twenty-four hours 
had passed. Here came C'lough in the last year of his life. 
Here Mrs. C'ameron li.xed her lens, marking the well-known 
faces as they passed : Darwin and Henry I'aylor, Watts and 
Aubrey de Vere, IvCcky and jowett, and a score of others. 

1 first knew the place in the aulunui, hut perhaps it is 
even more beautiful in the spring-time, when all day the 
lark trills high overhead, anil then when the lark has flown 
out of hearing the thrushes begin, and the air is sweet with 
scents from the many fragrant shrubs. The woods are full 
of anemones and primroses ; narcissus grows wild in the 
lower fields ; a lovely creamy stream of lk)wers flows along 
the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels ; hyacinth pools of 
blue shine in the wootls; and then with a later burst of 
glory comes the gorse. lighting up the country round about, 
and blazing on the beacon hill. The little sketch here given 
was made early one morning by Frederick Walker, who had 
eome over to see us at iMCshwater. The beacon hill stands 
hehinil I'arringfonl. If you cross the little wood of night- 
ingales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the black- 
thorn hedges shine (lovely dials that illuminate to show the 
hour), you come to the dow-ns, and climbing their smooth 
steeps you reach " High Down," where the beacon-staft' 
stanils firm upon the mound. Then, following the line of 
the cliffs, you come at last to the Needles, and may look 

41 







TliNNYSON KEADING MAUli 

From a sketch by Uante Gabriel Rossetti, 1855. [See Note on page 60.] 



clown upon the ridge of rocks that rise, crisp, sharp, shin- 
ing, out of the blue wash of fierce, delicious waters. 

The lovely places and sweet country all about Farring- 
ford are not among the least of its charms. Beyond the 
Primrose Island itself and the blue Solent, the New Forest 
spreads its shades, and the green depths reach to the very 
shores. Have we not all read of the forest where Merlin 
was becharmed, where the winds were still in the wild 




^ 



;^;JfT^ 





"^ 



FARRINGFORD BEACON 
From an uiipublislied sketch by I-"rederick Walker 

woods of Broceliande .-' The forest of lirockenhurst, in 
Hampshire, waves no less green, its ferns and depths are 
no less sweet and sylvan, than those of Brittany. 



"Before an oak, so hollow, huge, and old 
It look'd a tower of ruin'd mason-work. 

At Merlin's feet the wily Vivien lay." 

47 



Some people camping in the New Forest once told me of 
a mysterious figure in a cloak coming suddenly upon them 
out of a deep glade, passing straight on, looking neither to 
the right nor the left. '* It was either a ghost or it was Mr. 
Tennyson," said they. 

In Sir John Simeon's lifetime there was a constant inter- 
course between Farringford and Swanston. Sir John was 
one of Tennyson's most constant companions — a knight of 
courtesy he calls him in the sad lines written in the garden 
at Swanston. 

Maud grew out of a remark of Sir John Simeon's, to 
whom Tennyson had read the lines, 

"O that 'twere ])ossible 
After long grief and pain," 

which lines were, so to speak, the heart of Afaud. Sir John 
said that it seemed to him as if something were wanting to 
explain the story of this poem, and so by degrees it all grew. 
One little story was told me on the authority of Mr. Henry 
Sidgwick, who was perhaps present on that occasion. Ten- 
nyson was reading the poem to a silent company assembled 
in the twilight, and when he came to the birds in the high 
hall garden calling Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, he stopped 
short, and asked an authoress who happened to be present 
what birds these were. The authoress, much alarmed, and 
feeling that she must speak, and that the eyes of the 
whole company were upon her, faltered out, " Nightin- 
gales." "Pooh," said Tennyson, "what a cockney you 
are ! Nightingales don't say Maud. Rooks do, or some- 
thing like it. Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw." Then he went 
on reading. 

Reading, is it? One can hardly describe it. It is a sort 
of mystical incantation, a chant in which every note rises 
and falls and reverberates again. As we sit around the 










/\JM' p . 



THE OAK LAWN, ALDWOKTH 



twilight room at Farringford, with its great oriel-window 
looking to the garden, across fields of hyacinth and self- 
sowed daffodils towards the sea, where the waves wash 
against the rock, we seem carried by a tide not unlike the 
ocean's sound; it fills the room, it ebbs and flows away; 
and when we leave, it is with a strange music in our ears, 
feeling that we have for the first time, perhaps, heard what 
we may have read a hundred times before. 

Let me here note a fact, whether a tort or apropos of 
nightingales: once when Mr. Tennyson was in Yorkshire, 
so he told me, as he w^ walking at night in a friend's gar- 
den, he heard a nightingale singing with such a frenzy of 
passion that it was unconscious of everything else, and 
not frightened though he came and stood quite close be- 
side it ; he could see its eye flashing, and feel the air bub- 
ble in his ear through the vibration. Our poet, with his 
short-sighted eyes, can see farther than most people. Al- 
most the first time I ever walked out with him, he told me 
to look and tell him if the field -lark did not come down 
sideways upon its wing. 

Nature in its various aspects makes up a larger part of 
this man's life than it does for other people. He goes his 
way unconsciously absorbing life, and its lights and sounds, 
and teaching us to do the same as far as may be. There 
is an instance of this given in the pamphlet already quoted 
from, where the two friends talk on of one theme and an- 
other from Kenelm Digby to Aristophanes, and the poet 
is described as saying, among other things, that he knows 
of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant's 
eyes, and that it was from those of his own he learned that 
those of the Divine Child in Raffaello's Sistine Madonna 
were not overcharged with expression. 

Here is a reminiscence of Tennyson's about the echo at 
Killarney, where he said to the boatman, " When I last was 
here I heard eight echoes, and now I only hear one." To 

5t 



which the iiK^n, who had heard people quoting the bugle 
song, replied, "Why, you must be the gentleman that 
brought all the money to the place." 

I'eople have different ideas of poets. Mrs. B , of 

Totland's Hay, once asked a Freshwater boy, who was driv- 
ing her, " if he knew Mr. Tennyson." "He makes poets for 
the Queon," said the boy. "What do you mean?" said the 
lady, amused. " I don't know what they means," said the 
boy, " but jj'liceman often seen iiim walking about a-making 
of 'cm under the stars." The author of Eiiplirixnor has his 
own dclinition of a poet : 

" Tlie only living — and like to live — poet I have known, when he 
foiuul himself beside tlie ' bonuie Doon,' whether it were from recullee- 
tiim of [umr Hiiiiis, or of ' the days tiiat are no more ' which haunt us 
all, 1 know not — I think he did not know — ■' broke into a passion of 
(ears ' (as he told nie). Of tears, which during a pretty long and inti- 
mate intercourse I had never seen glistening in his eyes but once, when 
reading Virgil — ' dear old Virgil,' as he called him — together ; and then 
— oh, not of Queen Dido, nor of young ^[arcellus even, but of the burn- 
ing of Troy, in the second /Kneid — whether moved by the catastrophe 
itself, or tlu- majesty of the verse it is told in, or as before, scarce know- 
ing why. I'or as King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, 
though, as a great poet, comprehending all the softer stops of human 
emotion in that diapason where the intellectual, no less than what is 
called the poetical, faculty iiredominaleil." 

" Vou will last," Douglas Jerrold said. .And there was 
Carlyle's " Kh ! he has gx)t the grip of it," when Tennyson 
read him the Revenue. JUit perhaps the best compliment 
Mr. Tennyson ever receiveil was one day when walking in 
Covent (iiuileii, when he was stopped by a rough-looking 
man, who held out his haiul, and said : " You're Mr. Tenny- 
son. Look here, sir, here am I. I've been drunk for six 
days out of the seven, but if you will shake luo by the haiul, 
I'm d il if I ever get drunk again." 



'^m: ^ 










IX 



Aldworth was built some twenty years ago, when Lady 
Tennyson had been ordered change, and Freshwater was 
found to be unbearable and overcrowded during the sum- 
mer months. It must J^e borne in mind that to hospitable 
people there are dangers from friendly inroads as well as 
from the attacks of enemies. The new house, where for 
many years past the family has spent its summers, stands on 
the summit of a high, lonely hill in Surrey, and yet it is not 
quite out of reach of London life. It is a white stone house 
with many broad windows facing a great view and a long 
terrace, like some one of those at Siena or Perugia, with a 
low parapet of stone, where ivies and roses are trained, 
making a foreground to the lovely haze of the distance. 
Sometimes at Aldworth, when the summer days are at their 
brightest, and Blackdown top has been well warmed and 
sunned, I have seen a little procession coming along the 
terrace walk, and proceeding by its green boundary into a 
garden, where the sun shines its hottest, upon a sheltered 
lawn, and where standard rose-trees burn their flames: 
Lord Tennyson, in his cloak, going first, perhaps dragging 
the garden chair in which Lady Tennyson was lying; Hal- 
lam Tennyson following, with rugs and cushions for the rest 
of the party. If the little grandsons and their mother, in 
her white dress and broad, shady hat, and Lionel 'i'enny- 
son's boys, absorbed in their books of adventure, are there, 
the family group is complete. One special day I remember 
when we all sat for an hour round about the homely chair 

55 



and its gentle occupant. It seemed not unlike a realization 
of some Italian picture that I had somewhere seen : the 
tranquil eyes, the peaceful heights, the glorious summer 
day, some sense of lasting calm, of beauty beyond the 
present hour. 

Lord Tennyson works alone in the early hours of the 
morning:, and comes down long after his own frugal meal is 
over to find his guests assembling round the social break- 
fast-table. He generally goes out for a walk before lunch- 
eon, with his son and a friend, perhaps, and followed by 
a couple of dogs. Most of us know the look of the stately 
figure, the hanging cloak, and broad felt hat. 

There used to be one little ceremony peculiar to the 
Tennyson family, and reminding one of some college cus- 
tom which continued, that when dinner was over the 
guests used to be brought away into a second room, where 
stood a white table, upon which fruit and wine were set, 
and a fire burned bright, and a pleasant hour went by, 
while the master of the house sat in his carved chair and 
discoursed upon any topic suggested by his guests, or 
brought forth reminiscences of early Lincolnshire days, or 
from facts remembered out of the lives of past men who 
have been his friends. There was Rogers, among the rest, 
for whom he had a great affection, with whom he con- 
stantly lived during that lonely time in London. "I have 
dined alone with him," I heard Lord Tennyson say, "and 
we have talked about death till the tears rolled down his 
face." 

Tennyson met Tom Moore at Rogers's, and there, too, 
he first met Mr. Gladstone. John Forster, Leigh Hunt, and 
Landor were also friends of that time. One of Tenny- 
son's often companions in those days was Mr. Hallam, 
whose opinion he once asked of Carlyle's French Rei'olution. 
Mr. Hallam replied, in his quick, rapid way, " LTpon my 

S6 



word, I once opened tlic book, and read four r)r five pages. 
The style is so aljominable 1 could not get on with it." 
Whereas Carlyle's own criticism upon the History of the 
Middle Ages was, " Kh ! the poor, niiserahle skeleton of a 
book !" 

Was it not Cliarles f^anib who wanted to return grace 
after reading Shakespeare, little deeming in humble sim- 
plicity that many of us yet to come would be glad to return 
thanks for a jest of Charles Lamb's. 'I'he difference be- 
tween those who speak with reality, and those who go 
through life fitting thfcir second-hand ideas to other peo- 
ple's words, is one so marked that even a child may tell the 
difference. When the Laureate speaks, every word comes 
wise, racy, absolutely natural, and sincere ; and how gladly 
do we listen to his delightful stories, full (jf odd humors and 
knowledge of men and women, or to his graver talk ! 1 re- 
member thinking how true was the phrase of Lionel Tenny- 
son's concerning his father, " When a man has read so much 
and thought so much, it is an epitome of llie knowledge 
of to-day we fmd in him," an epitome indeed touched l)y 
the solemn strain of the poet's own gift. 1 once heard 
Tennyson talking to some actors, to no less a person in- 
deed than to Hamlet liimself, for after the curtain fell the 
whole play seemed to flow from off the stage into the box 
where we had been sitting, and I could scarcely tell at last 
where reality began and Shakespeare ended. The play was 
over, and we ourselves seemed a part of it still ; here were 
the players, and our own prince poet, in that familiar simple 
voice we all know, explaining the art, going straight to the 
point in his own downright fashion, criticising with delicate 
appreciation, by the simple force of truth and conviction 
carrying all before him. "You are a good actor lost," one 
of these, the real actor, said to him. 

It is a gain to the world when people are content to be 

59 



themselves, not chipped to the smooth pattern of the times, 
but simple, original, and unaffected in ways and words. 
Here is a poet leading a poet's life ; where he goes there 
goes the spirit of his home, whether in London among the 
crowds, or at Aldworth on the lonely height, or at Farring- 
ford in that beautiful bay. The last time 1 went to see him 
in London he was smoking in a top room in Eton Square. 
It may interest an American public to be told that it was 
Durham tobacco from North Carolina, which Mr. Lowell 
had given him. 1 could not but feel how little even cir- 
cumstance itself can contribute to that mysterious essence 
of individuality which we all recognize and love. In this 
commonplace London room, with all the stucco of Uelgravia 
round about, I found the old dream realized, the old charm 
of youthful impression. There sat my friend as I had fust 
seen him years ago among the clouds. 

Noi'K. — This early sketch was preserved by Robert Browning, to 
whose courtesy we are indebted for its use, and was one of the interest- 
ing pictures of the Rossetti cxhiliitimi hild in London after tlio painter's 
death. Mrs. Browning was another of tlic distinguished company. 




THE TENNYSON COAT OF AKMS 



JOHN RUSKIN 



Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
That mind and soul, according well, 
May make one music as before." 




SI 



from 
room 






:i, 



BRANTWOOD 



W^ 



the 
in 



HEN the writer of 
this essay tries to 
go back to her first impres- 
sions of John Ruskin, she 
finds that they must date 
round-table in the middle of her father's drawing- 
Kensington — the little drawing-room in Young 
63 



Street, with the bow-windows, the oak-leaved carpet, the 
polished bookcase with its glass doors, and the aforesaid 
round-table with its dial of books arranged in a circle, and 
faithfully marking the march of time. For, looking at a 
list of Mr. Ruskin's works, I find that the Seven Lamps of 
AnJiitccture was published in 1849, soon after we came to 
live in England in our father's house. And in this year 
there appeared among the Punches and the lovely red silk 
Annuals and Keepsakes that illuminated the bow-windowed 
room a volume bound (so it seemed to us children) in 
moulded slabs of pure chocolate. I can still recall the 
look of the broad margins, the pictures, and noble-looking 
printed pages, and although the Annuals with the fascinat- 
ing brides and veiled ladies, and the ghosts and guitars and 
brigands, were perhaps more to our childish tastes, even 
then we realized in some indefinite way the importance of 
the big brown book which opened like a casket, and gath- 
ered some impressions of palace windows and of carved 
shadows from its pages — impressions to be afterwards turned 
into actual stone and sunlight. 

As time went on, the Stones of Venice in due course took 
their place upon our dial, and meanwhile the name of the 
writer of the beautiful authoritative books is among those 
other echoes, which are so familiar that one can scarcely 
tell when they begin to sound. 

In the first page of the eleventh chapter of Frceterita 
occurs the name of " Mrs. John Simon, who," says Ruskin, 
" in my mother's old age was her most deeply trusted 
friend." It was at this lady's house, sitting by the kind 
hostess of many a year to be, that the writer first saw the 
author of Modern Painters, while at the other end of the 
table Mr. Simon, now Sir John (" Brother John," Ruskin 
dubbed him long since), sat carving, as was his wont, roast 
mutton — " be it tender and smoking and juicy " — and dis- 

64 



pensing, as is still his wont, trimmings and oracles and 
epigrams with every plateful. 

I could even now quote some of the words Ruskin spoke 
on that summer's evening in Great Cumberland Street, and 
I can see him as he was then almost as plainly as on the 
last time that we met. His mood on that first occasion 
was one of deep depression, and I can remember being 
frightened as well as absorbed by his talk. Was he joking ? 
was he serious ? I could hardly follow what he said then, 
though now it all seems simple enough. But good company 
is like good wine, and irjiproves by keeping, and let us hope 
that this applies to the recipients as well as to the feast 
itself, 

Ruskin seemed less picturesque as a young man than in 
his later days. Perhaps gray waving hair may be more 
becoming than darker locks, but the speaking, earnest eyes 
must have been the same, as well as the tones of that de- 
lightful voice, with its slightly foreign pronunciation of the 
r, which seemed so familiar again when it welcomed us to 
Coniston long, long years after. Meeting thus after fifteen 
years, I was struck by the change for the better in him ; by 
the bright, radiant, sylvan look which a man gains by living 
among woods and hills and pure breezes. 



II 



The road to Brantwood* runs beneath the old trees 
which shade the head of Coniston Water, and you leave 
the village and the inn behind, and the Thwaite, with 
its pretty old gardens and peacocks, and skirt the beautiful 
grounds of Monk Coniston ; you pass the ivy tower where 
the lords of the manor keep their boats ; and the reeds 
among which the, swallows and dragon -tiies are darting; 
and as you advance, if you look back across the green hay- 
fields and wooded slopes of Monk Coniston, you can see 
^Veatherlam and Ravenscrag, with Yewdale for a back- 
ground, while Coniston Olil Man on the opposite side of 
the lake rises like a Pilatus above the village, and soars 
into changing lights and clouds. Then, as you walk still 
farther along the road, leaving all these things behind, you 
pass into a sweet Arcadia, in which, indeed, one loses one's 
self again in after- times. You go by Tent Lodge, where 
Tennyson once dwelt, where the beautiful Romneys are 
hanging on the walls ; you pass the cottage with roses for 
bricks, and with jasmines and honeysuckles for thatch, and 
the farm where the pet lamb used to dwell, to the terror of 
the children (^it seemed appropriate enough to Wordsworth's 

* Ruskin, writing of his earliest recollections of Coniston in /'nrU>//,i, says : " The 
inn at Coniston was then actually at the upper end of the lake, the road from Amble- 
side to the village passing just between it and the water, and the view of the long reach 
of lake, with its softly wooded lateral hills, had for my father a tender charm which ex- 
cited the same feeling as that with which he afterwards regarded the lakes of Italy. 
Lowwood Inn also was then little more than a country cottage, and Ambleside a rural 
village, and the absolute peace and bliss which any one who cared for grassy hills and 
for sweet waters might find at every footstep and at every turn of crag or bend of bog 
was totally unlike anything I ever saw or read of elsewhere." 



country, Init I can remember a little baby girl wild with ter- 
ror and Hying from its gambols); then, still following the 
road, you reach a delightful cackling colony of poultry and 
ducks, where certain hospitable ladies used to experiment- 
alize, and prove to us whether or no eggs are eggs (as these 
ladies have determined eggs should be) ; then comes Low 
l>ank Ground, our own little farm lodging among the chest- 
nut-trees and meadows full of flowers. It had been the site 
of a priory once, and on this slope and in the shade of the 
chestnut-trees, where monks once dwelt, the writer met Rus- 
kin again after many years. He, the master of Brantwood, 
came, as I remember, dressed with some ceremony, meeting 
us with a certain old-fashioned courtesy and manner ; but he 
spoke with his heart, of which the fashion doesn't change 
happily from one decade to another ; and as he stood in his 
tall hat and frock-coat upon the green, the clouds and drifts 
came blowing up from every quarter of heaven, and I can 
almost see him while he talked with emphasis and remem- 
brance of that which was then in both our minds. Low 
Bank Ground is but a very little way from Brantwood ; you 
can go there by land or by water. If you walk, the road 
climbs the spur of the hill, and runs below moors by a wood 
where squirrels sit under the oak-trees and honeysuckles 
drop from the branches; or, if you like to, go by the lake, 
you can get Timothy from the farm to row you. " A dash 
of the oars, and you are there," as Ruskin said, and accord- 
ingly we started in the old punt for our return visit to 
Brantwood. 

The sun came out between rain clouds as the boat struck 
with a hollow crunch against the stones of the tiny landing 
pier. Timothy from the farm, who had come to pilot us, told 
us with a sympathetic grin that Mr. Ruskin — " Rooskin," 
1 think he called him — "had built t' pier, and set t' stoans 
himsel' wi' the other gentlemen, but they had to send for t' 

67 



smith from the village to make t' bolts faaster." The pier 
is fast enough, running out into the lake, with a little fleet 
safely anchored behind it, while Brantwood stands high up 
on the slope, with square windows looking across the waters. 
Just on the other side of the lake, wrapped in mysterious 
ivy wreaths, where the cows are whisking their tails beneath 
■the 6lms, rise the gables of the old farm, once the manor- 
iiouse where " Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," once 
dwelt. Sir Philip Sidney used to come riding across the dis- 
tant hills to visit her there — so tradition says. The mere 
thought of Coniston Water brings back the peaceful le- 
gends and sounds all about Ruskin's home : the plash of 
the lake, the rustle of the leaves and rushes, the beat of 
birds on their whirring wings, the flop of the water-rats, the 
many buzzing and splashing and delicious things. A path 
up a garden of fruit and flowers, of carnations and straw- 
berries, leads with gay zigzags to the lawn in front of the 
Brantwood windows. 

The house is white, plain, and comfortable, absolutely 
unpretending. I remember noticing, with a thrill, the um- 
brella-stand in the glass door. So Mr. Ruskin had an um- 
brella just like other people ! It seemed to me to be a 
dwelling planned for sunshine, and sunshine on the lakes 
is of a quality so sweet and rare that it counts for more 
than in any other place. The brightness of Brantwood, 
the squareness, and its unaffected comfortableness, were, I 
think, the chief characteristics. You had a general impres- 
sion of solid, old-fashioned furniture, of amber-colored dam- 
ask curtains and coverings ; there were Turners and other 
water -color pictures in curly frames upon the drawing- 
room walls — a Prout, I think, among them; there was a 
noble Titian in the dining-room, and the full-length portrait 
of a child in a blue sash over the sideboard, which has be- 
come familiar since then to the readers of rnvtcrita: and 

6S 



most certainly was there an absence of any of the art-diph- 
thongs and peculiarities of modern taste : only the simplest 
and most natural arrangements for the comfort of the in- 
mates and their guests. Turkey carpets, steady round-tables, 
and above all a sense of cheerful, hospitable kindness, which 
seems to be traditional at Brantwood. For many years past 
Mrs. Severn has kept her cousin's house, and welcomed his 
guests with her own. 

That evening — the first we spent at Brantwood — the 
rooms were lighted by slow sunset cross-lights from the lake 
without. Mrs. Severn ^at in her place behind a silver urn, 
while the master of the house, with his back to the window, 
was dispensing such cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those 
who have been his guests will best realize. Fine wheaten 
bread and Scotch cakes in many a crisp circlet and crescent, 
and trout from the lake, and strawberries such as only grow 
on the Brantwood slopes. Were these cups of tea only, or 
cups of fancy, feeling, inspiration ? And as we crunched 
and quaffed we listened to a certain strain not easily to be 
described, changing from its graver first notes to the sweet- 
est and most charming vibrations. 



Ill 



Who can ever recall a good talk that is over? You can 
remember the room in which it was held, the look of the 
chairs, but the actual talk takes wings and flies away. A 
dull talk has no wings, and is rememberd more easily ; so 
are those tiresome conversations which consist of sentences 
which we all repeat by rote, sentences which have bored us 
a hundred times before, and which do not lose this property 



by long use. But a real talk leaps into life ; it is there al- 
most before we are conscious of its existence. What system 
of notation can mark it down as it flows, modulating from 
its opening chords to those delightful exhilarating strains 
which are gone again almost before we have realized them. 

Ruskin was explaining his views in his own words as we 
sat there. I should do him ill justice if I tried to transcribe 
his sermon. The text was that strawberries should be ripe 
and sweet, and we munched and marked it then and there ; 
that there should be a standard of fitness applied to every 
detail of life ; and this standard, with a certain gracious 
malice, wit, hospitalit3^ and remorselessness, he began to 
apply to one thing and another, to one person and another, 
to dress, to food, to books. I remember his describing to 
my brother-in-law Leslie Stephen the shabby print and 
paper that people were content to live with, and contrasting 
with these the books he himself was then printing for the 
use of the shepherds round about. And among the rest he 
showed us Sir Philip Sidney's pharaphrase of the Psalms, 
which he has long since given to the world in the Biblio- 
theca Pastorum. Let us trust these fortunate shepherds 
are worthy of their print and margins. 

If, as I have already said, we compare the talk of great 
men and women "who will cause this age to be remem- 
bered," one element is to be found in them all — a certain 
directness, simplicity, and vivid reality ; a gift for reaching 
their hearers at once, giving light straight from themselves, 
and not in reflections from other minds ; sunshine, in short, 
not moonshine. Perhaps something of this may be due to 
the habit of self-respect and self-reliance which success and 
strength of purpose naturally create. Many uncelebrated 
people have the grace of convincing simplicity, but I have 
never met a really great man without it. As one thinks of 
it, one recognizes that a great man is greater than we are 

70 




JOHN RUSKIM — [From portrait by Hubert Herkomer, A. R. A. 
From the etching published by Fine Art Society, London 



because his aim (consciously or unconsciously) is juster, his 
strength stronger and less strained ; his right is more right 
than ours, his certainty more certain ; he shows us the best 
of that which concerns him, and the best of ourselves too 
in that which concerns lis in his work or his teaching. 

If we look at the Elgin marbles, for instance, we feel that 
the standard of human attainment is forever raised by those 
broken lines in eternal harmony, and we also indefinitely 
realize that while looking at them we ourselves are at our 
best in sculpture ; and so listening back to the echoes of a 
lifetime, we can most of »s still hear some strains very clear, 
very real and distinct, out of all the confusion of past noise 
and chatter ; and the writer (nor is she alone in this) must ever 
count the magic of the music of Brantwood oratory among 
such strains. Music, oratory, I know not what to call that 
wondrous gift which subjugates all who come within its reach. 

" God uses us to help each otlier so, lending our minds out." 

If ever a man lent out his mind to help others, Ruskin is 
the man. From country to country, from age to age, from 
element to element, he leads the way, while his audience, 
laughing, delighted, follows with scrambling thoughts and 
apprehensions and flying leaps, he meanwhile illustrating 
each delightful, fanciful, dictatorial sentence with pictures 
by the way — things, facts, objects interwoven, bookcases 
opening wide, sliding drawers unlocked with his own mar- 
vellous keys — and lo ! we are perhaps down in the centre of 
the earth, far below Brantwood and its surrounding hills, 
among specimens, minerals, and precious stones, Ruskin 
still going ahead, and crying " sesame " and " sesame," and 
revealing each secret recess of his King's Treasury in turn, 
pointing to each tiny point of light and rainbow veined in 
marble, gold and opal, crystal and emerald. Then, perhaps, 
while we are wondering, and barely beginning to apprehend 

^—2 73 



his delightful illustrations, the lecturer changes from natural 
things to those of art, from veins of gold meandering in the 
marble and speaking of ages, to coins marking the history 
of man. I was specially struck by some lovely old Holbein 
pieces of Henry VHI. which he brought out. I can still 
see Ruskin's hand holding the broad gold mark in its palm. 
Who could help speculating at such a moment.'' Whence 
had it come, that golden token, since Holbein laid his 
chisel down ? From what other hands had it reached this 
one ? Had Shakespeare once had the spending of it, had 
Bacon clutched at it, or had Buckingham Hung it to the 
wind, or Jiad Milton owned it, perhaps, before Cromwell 
called the King's money back into his own treasury ? Any- 
how, this golden piece has escaped the Puritan's crucibles, 
and here it is still, to show us what a golden coin has been, 
and lying safe in the Brantwood treasury. 



IV 



It is now several years since we were at Coniston, and I 
may have perhaps somewhat confused the various occasions 
when we went to Brantwood. One year the family was ab- 
sent during our stay, but tokens of present kindness came 
day after day — basketfuls brought up by the gardener, roses 
and the afore-mentioned strawberries, and other ripe things 
that had colored in its sunshine. 

Another year when we were staying at the farm Ruskin 
was at Brantwood, alone with a young relative, and he asked 
us to go up and see him. Again I remember one of those 
long monologues, varied, absorbing, combining pictures and 
metaphors into one delightful whole, while^the talker, carried 



along by his own interest in his subject, would be starting 
to his feet, bringing clown one and another volume from the 
shelf, opening the page between his hands, and beginning 
to read the passage appropriate to his theme. It was some 
book of Indian warfare that lie brought down from its place, 
and as he opened it lie (hen and there began his sermon: 
spoke of the example which good Christian men and wom- 
en might set in any part (jf the world -, ciuoted Sir Herbert lul- 
wards, whom he loxed and admired, as an example of what 
a true man should be. He spoke of him with kindling eyes, 
warming as he went on to tell, as only a Ruskin could tell 
it, the iieroic iiistory of the Inst Sikh war. What happened 
in India yesterday he ditl n(A know; he said he sometimes 
spent months without once looking at the papers, and in de- 
liberate ignorance of what was happening and not hapi)en- 
ing in their columns. 

There is a story told of Ruskin receiving a telegram noi 
long ago from scjme member of the royal family, of which 
he could ncjt construe the meaning until he called in the 
telegraph boy, who then informed him of an event with 
which the country had been ringing for weeks past, and to 
which the telegram related. 

1 further remember, among other things, after his little 
lecture upon "True Knights," a dijlightful description of 
what a True Lady should be. " A princess, a washer-woman," 
he said—" yes, a washer-woman ! 'i'o see that all is fair and 
clean, to wash with water, to cleanse and purify wherever she 
goes, to set disordered things in orderly array — this was a 
woman's mission." Which sentence has often occurred to 
me since then at irritating moments of household adminis- 
tration. Ruskin has written .something not unlike it in his 
lecture upon "Queen's (}ardens ;" but how different is tiie 
impression left, even by such printers' type as hi.s, from that 
of the words and the voice flowing on in its measure ! 



The writer, speaking to one of Ruskin's most constant 
and faithful readers, once compared him to a Prospero, 
thinking of this strange power of his over the minds of those 
who are in his company, of the sweet harmonies he can raise 
at will, of the wanderings he can impose upon his subjects, 
and of his playful humors and fanciful experiments upon 
the audience, " be it to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to 
ride on the curl'd cloud." Mrs. Fanny Kemble, who was 
the lady in question (she sat with a volume of Modern Paint- 
ers open before her), said : " No ; I myself see no resem- 
blance whatever between the two : Prospero dealt with magic 
and unreality ; the power of Ruskin lies in the extraordinary 
reality of his teaching. Think what a vision of beauty lies 
spread before that man." And this is certainly high and 
worthy praise, coming from one who herself belongs to the 
noble race of spiritual pastors and masters. Mrs. Kemble 
concluded by quoting Ruskin's account of a heap of gravel 
by the road-side, which she had just been reading, and which 
she said had struck her as one of the most remarkable de- 
scriptions ever written in the English language. 



V 



Ruskin has said somewhere that his three great masters 
have been Tintoret, Carlyle, and Turner. When John Rus- 
kin, the son of John Ruskin, was born in 1819, Titian had 
been dead over two hundred years ; Carlyle, beginning life, 
was living in Edinburgh, where he was supporting himself 
by literature and by articles in Dr. Brewster's Encyclopicdia ,• 
Turner was a man of forty-four, already well advanced in 
life; he had published liis Liber Stiiiiioniiii, painted many 




noble pictures; he had built his 
house in Queen Anne Street, and 
was then starting for Italy. It was 
a dull and unromantic time in the 
history of England, a time reach- 
ing beyond the fifty years' radius of our recent Jubilee. 
Men, weary of war, were resting and counting its cost ; 
the poor were suffering, the rich were bankrupt ; the old 
King was dying, Princess Charlotte was dead ; the Regent 
was absorbed in his schemes and selfish ends ; corn was 
at starvation prices ; mobs were breaking out in discon- 
tent and riot-, and yet no less than in more propitious 
hours were the divine sparks falling from heaven— upon chil- 
dren at their play, upon infants in their cradles, who were 
to grow up with hearts kindled by that sacred ilame which, 
refracted from generation to generation, keeps the world 
alive. 

79 



"See a disencliantcd nation 
Spring like clay from desolation ; 
To Truth its state is dedicate, 
And Freedom leads it forth." 

So wrote Shelley, at that time looking his last at the Bay 
of Naples, and completing the first act of his Fromet/teus, 
while Browning and Tennyson were children at play in their 
fathers' gardens — Tennyson hidden far away among Lin- 
colnshire wolds and levels, Browning plucking his own brand 
of Promethean fire somewhere on the heights that encircle 
the great city where Ruskin, still lying in his cradle, had 
not as yet found a miraculous voice to cry out with, and to 
protest that though love of Truth and Justice might be the 
same for both, Shelley's Freedom and John Ruskin's Free- 
dom were as unlike as night and day.* 

" I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of 
the old school — Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and 
Homer's," says Ruskin in the first lines of Prirferita, going 
back to those early days when his lately married father and 
mother had settled down in Bloomsbury, and when he him- 
self first comes upon the scene, " a child with yellow hair, 
dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad, light blue 
sash and blue shoes to match," standing at a window, and 
watching the events of the street. 

As one reads Pratcrita it seems as if John Ruskin wrote 
his history not with ink, but painted it down with light 
and color; he brings the very atmosphere of his life and its 
phases before us with such an instantaneous mastery as few 
besides have ever reached — the life within, without the 
sweet eternal horizons (even though they be but Norwood 



* " My own teaching has been and is that Liberty, whether in the body, soul, or 
political estate of men, is only another word for Death, and the final issue of Death- 
Putrefaction ; the body, spirit, and political estate being licalthy only by their bonds 
and laws." — 1875, Fors, Letter 411. 

80 



hills and ridges), the living and delightful figures in the 
foreground. 

Its author has chosen to christen the story Prcetcrita, but 
was ever a book less belonging to the past and more en- 
tirely present to our inood than this one ? Not Goethe's 
own autobiography, not even Carlyle's passionate reminis- 
cences, come up to it in vividness. There are so few words, 
such limpid images are brought flashing before us, that in 
our secret consciousness we remember rather than we read." 
Are we not actually living in its pages, in the dawning light 
of that austere yet gloriows childhood .-" Half a century rolls 
back, and we see the baby up above at the drawing-room 
windows, standing absorbed, watching the water-carts, and 
that wondrous turn-cock, "who turns and turns till a fount- 
ain springs up in the middle of the street," and as we still 
watch the child, gazing out with his blue, deep-set eyes, the 
brown brick walls somehow become transparent, as they did 
for Ebenezer Scrooge, and we are in the same mysterious 
fashion absorbed into the quiet home and silent life. We 
get to know the inmates with some immaterial friendship 
and intimacy. The father, " that entirely honest man " of 
rare gifts and refinement, going and coming to his wine- 
merchant's office in Billeter Street; the mother, combining 
the spirit of Martha and of Mary, unflinching, orderly, living 
for her husband and her son, not rejecting the better part, 
but forcing every member of her household to conform to 
her views of both worlds, and binding down their lives by 
some emphatic and restraining power. But how soon the 
child born to such liberty of thought, to sUch absolute obedi- 
ence of will, learns to escape from his bonds, to create his 
own life and world ! His very playthings (all others being 
denied to him) he makes for himself out of the elements, the 
air above, the waters beneath, the craters of the coal-heavers 
as they empty the sacks at the door. " My mother's general 



principles of the first treatment were to guard me with steady 
watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and for the 
rest to let me amuse myself; but the law was I should find 
my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first al- 
lowed, and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic 
poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birth- 
days, thinking to overcome my mother's resolution by splen- 
dor of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and 
Judy she could find in all ihe Soho Bazar, as big as a real 
Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that 
would dance. . . . My mother was obliged to accept them, 
but afterwards quietly told me it was not right I should have 
them, and 1 never saw them again." 

This Croydon aunt must have been a good and loving 
aunt to little John. " Whenever my father was ill," he says 
— " and hard work and sorrow had already set their mark on 
him — we all went down to Croydon to be petted by my 
homely aunt, and walk on Duppas Hill and on the heather 
of Addington." He dwells with affectionate remembrance 
upon the house and its gables and early fascinations for 
him. " My chosen domain being the shop, the back room, 
and the stones round the spring of crystal water at the back 
door (long since let down into the modern sewer), and my 
chief companion my aunt's dog Towser, whom she had 
taken pity on when he was a snappish, starved vagrant, and 
made a brave and affectionate dog of, which was the kind 
of thing she did for every living creature that came in her 
way all her life long." 

Mrs. Ruskin, with all her passionate devotion to her son, 
seems to have had no idea whatever of making a little child 
happy. The baby's education was terribly consistent; he 
was steadily whipped when he was troublesome or when he 
tumbled down-stairs. "We seldom had company even 
on week-days, and I was never allowed to come down to 



dessert until much later in life, when I was able to crack 
other people's nuts for them, but never to have any myself, 
nor anything else of a dainty kind. Once at Hunter Street 
I recollect my mother giving me three raisins in the forenoon 
out of the store -cabinet." But not all the rules and rails 
and restrictions of Hunter Street and Brunswick Square 
could prevent the child from finding out for himself that 
brick walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. He 
stands in the light of the window, in his silent, thoughtful 
fashion, creating his own existence for himself, and just as 
tlie turn -cock turned aijid turned until a fountain sprang 
from the pavement, so even in baby life does Ruskin lay his 
master-hand upon the stones, and lo ! the stream of life be- 
gins to flow. In later days he smites the rock, and bids the 
children drink living waters from the spring of life eternal, 
sometimes al.so to be mingled with those waters of strife 
"called Meribah."* 



VI 



It was up on the summit of Heme Hill that John Ruskin 
the elder (when he felt that his affairs justified him in so 
doing) bought the semi-detached house standing among 
the almond blossoms, from whence Ruskin dates the pref- 
ace to PrcBterita. " I write these few prefatory words on 
my father's birthday," says Ruskin, in the year 1886, "in 
what was once my nursery in his old house, to which he 
brought my mother and me sixty- two years since, I being 
then four years old." 

We have good reason to be grateful to a writer who sets 
down for our happy reading such remembrance, such silence, 

* See the first volume of Modfrn Painters and certain numbers of Deucalion, etc. 

«3 



as tliis. Almost t-Vfiy tliild lias si>nu* natural jilamoiir and 
instiml of its own hv wliiili tlu> s;lari' ol lilr is sdltciu'd, anil 
llir tiist sli'c'|) \va\ s };ai l.mdcil .iinl rased .md (ii.iimt'd. W't- 
call tliosi' nu-n poiis wlu) utaii\ this divine laiidiv all tlicii 
livrs, and wlio arc ahir to i(intii\ut> lookini; at tlu' woild 
Willi tin- rliMi <,\.\/r lit rluKlliood, disrcrninj; tin- uiuliani;in^ 
natural tliin};s and l)i'autii\s in tlu" niiilst ol all tlu> wandiM ini;s 
ol disappoinlnu'nt and contusion. Such a port is Kuskin. 
ii cviM a man was hoi n one. I aUc tin- sloi v ol hi lie John at 
play in his rhildish !;aiilcn, wIumc the mulhiMiy Ucc and llu" 
white luMil ilunv tree are i^rowiii!; : " riu> i;rounil was ah 
sohilelv lienerueni wilh niai;ieal spKMuloi ol ahiindant tinil, 
Iri'sh meen.solt and)er, ami roui;h hristled erimsou. bendinj; 
the spini>ns hranehes, elnsteri'd peail and piMulent ruhv. 
joyluUy disi'ovcrable undri ihe laiL^i- Km\i's that looked like 
vine.". . . "Ihe dilTeienees ol piiinal imimrtanei' whieh I 
observed," he savs, " belweiMi the nature ol this i;arden and 
that ol l'"den, as I ima^iiu-d U. W(-ie lii.il ni Ihis oi\e ,/// ihe 
Irnit was loi bidden, and [\\v\c were noeomi)anionable beasts." 
Then follows a tiuiih of which many a parent will ruetullv 
.icknowled!',e the linth : " Mv nu>lhei, lindin;; lu-i c\\\ci pi't- 
sonal pleasure in her lioweis, was otien pl.intiui; or pruninj; 
beside nu>, at U.isl it I chose to stay besidi" her. . . . ller 
presence was no n'sli.iinl to me. .nul .dso no p.uticnlar 
pleasuu', loi, lioin h.w ini; always been lelt so much alone, I 
had i;iM»etallv m\ own little alTairs to see to. and by the tim{> 
I WftS scviMi years old 1 was .dre.idv indcpeuilcnt ment.dU 
bolh ol' my t.ilhei and niothei, .nul lia\in<; nobody c^lsi" to 
\ic ilepi'Uilenl upon, be;',.in to le.id ,i \ iM'v stn.ill, poky, ion 
lenled, conceited, ( "ock Kobinson Crusoe sort iA lite." 

Mow tlu'se worils scl one lo the miMsure .nul the iVelinj; 
of that isol.\teil mystic, d litlle Wic in thecentr.d point of the 
univcise, .is he s.iys it ,ippe,iri'd (o him, .is il must m'nei.dl\- 
,ippeai til >;eomeli ii'.d .inim.ds ! 



When little John grew older he learned to read and to spell 
with what seems absolutely wonderful quickness. Every 
morning after breakfast he sat down with his mother to 
read the Bible. " My mother never gave me more to learn 
than she knew I could easily get learned, if I set myself 
honestly to work, by twelve o'clock. She never allowed 
anything to disturb me when my task was set ; and in gen- 
eral, even when Latin grammar came to supplement the 
Psalms, I was my own master for at least half an hour 
before the half-past one dinner." The list of those portions 
of the Psalms and chapters of the Bible which little John 
Ruskin had to learn by heart is conscientiously given, and 
might seem to some of us an appalling list. But upon this 
he comments as follows : " Truly, though I have picked up 
the elements of a little further knowledge, and owe not a 
little to the teaching of many people, this maternal installa- 
tion of my mind in that property of chapters I count very 
confidently the most precious, and on the whole the one 
essential, part of my education." " Peace, Obedience, Faith," 
were the three great boons of his early life, he says, and 
"the habit of fixed attention." The defects of it are told 
very forcibly in language which is pathetic in its directness. 
" I had nothing to love. My parents were, in a sort, visible 
powers of nature to me ; no more loved than the sun and 
moon." And thus he sums it up. His life was too formal 
and too luxurious ; " by protection innocent, instead of by 
practice virtuous." 

Ruskin should have been a novelist. It is true, he says 
he never knew a child more incapable than himself of tell- 
ing a tale, but when he chooses to describe a man * or a 
woman, there stands the figure before us ; when he tells a 

* Take these few lines descriptive of Severn: " Lightly sagacious, lovingly hu- 
morous, daintily sentimental, as if life were but for liim the rippling chant of his fa- 
vorite song, ' Gente ! e qui Vuccellatore.'' " 

87 



story, we live it. I lis is rather the descriptive than tlie con- 
structive faculty ; his mastery is over detail and tiuality 
rather than over form. How delightfully he remembers ! 
How one loves his journeys in Mr. Telford's post-chaise, 
where he sits propped upon his own little trunk between 
father and mother, looking out at the country through the 
glass windows. Mr. Ruskin the elder is travelling for or- 
ders, and he brings his family north, and finally to his sis- 
ter's home in Perth, where we read of the Scottish aunt and 
the playfellow cousins, of the dark pools of Tay, of the path 
above them, " being seldom traversed by us children, except 
at harvest-time, when we used to go gleaning in the lields 
beyond." " I hesitate in recording as a constant truth for 
the world the impression left on me, when 1 went gleaning 
with Jessie, that Scottish sheaves are more golden than are 
found in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible 
to iunnan eves are so like the corn of heaven* as those of 
Strath i'ay and Slralh lOarn." 

Was ever story more simple, more pathetic, tiian the story 
of little Peter and his mother! "My aunt, a pure dove- 
priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland l)odona, was 
of a far gentler temper, but still to me remained at a wistful 
distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of 
three ot her children before her husband's death. Little 
Peter especially had been the corner-stone of her love's 
building; and it was thrown down swiftly. White-swelling 
came in the knee ; he suffered much, and grew weaker grad- 
ually, dutiful always, and loving, antl wholly patient. She 
wanted him one day to take half a glass of ]iort-wine, and 
took him on her knee and put it to his li|\s. ' Not now, 
mamma ; in a minute.' said he, and put his head on her 
shoulder, and ga\e one long, low sigh, and died.'' 



* I'salms, Ixxviii., 24. 
88 



Liltlc I'eter's mother followed him Ix-forc iminy years, and 
tlie rest of her children havinjj; passed one by oik- throii^^h 
the dark river, Mary, the only survivor, comes lo live in the 
kuskin household, "a sereix; additional nculr:d tint" in 
the iiome. 

'I'Ik; two cliildicn read tin' llihic toi^clhcr, write abslracts 
of liie sennoiis in the c liapel at Walworth, wliieh they at- 
tend. On the Sundays when the family remain at home 
the father reads iJlair's s(;rmons aloud, or if a ( lerk or cus- 
tomer dines with them, "the conversation in mere necessary 
courtesy would take lli(>.(lire-(;tion of sherry" (Dickens iiim- 
self might have envied this loneh), while the two children 
sit silent in their corner with the /'ihiri/ii's /'/oj^ress and 
(^uarles's Jiinblcms and I'bx's Jh)ok of Alarlyrs to pass the 
time. 

On week-days John, who is now ten years old, is learning 
(ireek with Dr. Andrews, copying Cruikshank'.s illustrations, 
and writing English doggerel. 

When Ruskin was turned twelve his mother had taken 
Jiim six times through the I5ible ; he had had various clas- 
sical masters, drawing masters, and other teachers; he had 
begun to study mineralogy, was allowed lo taste wine, to 
go to a theatre, and on festive chiys tf) dine with his father 
and mother, and to listen to his father's reading of the 
NdcIcs Amhrosiarui'. TiWfX (.A Hyron. On Riiskin's thirteenth 
birthday his father's ])artner, Mr. Henry Telford, gives liim 
Rogers's Italy, with its illustrations, and, so he says, de- 
termined the main tenor of his life. "The drawing-master 
had vaguely stated that flu-, world had be(;n greatly dazzled 
and led away by some sjjlendid ideas thrown out by Turner, 
but until tiien Turner had not existed for the f|uiet family 
on Heme I lill." 

Besides all these rising inter(,-sts there are also the de- 
scriptions of the |)eople fnot very numerous; who begin Ui 



cross the stage, we get glimpses of the neighbors, ami wl' 
seem to know them .as we know the people out of Wuiitv 
Fair, or out of Miss Austen's novels : Mr. Telford, tlie 
owner of the travelling carriage and the giver of illustrated 
books; (he two clerks at \W\\ work — Henry Ritchie, who 
loves Margate — (If you want to l)o happy, get a wife and 
come to Margate, he writes)— and Henry Watson and his 
musical sisters. Then there is Miss Andrews, who sang 
"Tambourgi, 'I'ambourgi ;" old Mrs. Munroe, with Petite, 
her white poodli- ; and lier daughter Mrs. Richard Gray, 
"entirely simple, meek, loving, and serious, saved from be- 
ing stupid by a vivid nature full of enthusiasm, like her hus- 
band's." It is I'.nglish middle-class life for the most put. 
described with sometliing of (George Kliot's racy reality. 



VII 



In tlie early chapters of /'/li-frrifii there is the story of 
Ruskin's tirst acquaintance with the enchanting DonieCq 
family, which played so important a part in his young life — 
the four girls who, arriving unexpectedly, reduced him " to 
a heap of white ashes," which iiwrcredi dcs cctii/n's, we read, 
lasted four years. We are not exactly told which of the 
sisters — whether .Vdele, the graceful blonde of fifteen, C'e- 
cile, the dark-eyed, tlnelv browed girl of tiiirteen, or Klise 
or little C\aroline of eleven, was (he chief favorite. They 
had all been born abroad ; they spoke Spanish and French 
with perfect grace, English with broken precision; he de- 
scribes "a Southern Cross of uuconceived stars floating on 
a sudden into my obscure firmament of a London suburb." 

'I'he writer can picture to herself something ot" the charm 



v..../* 







1 r wM^^vv ^mrj%m^^ '* 

^' ^[ ' ^r ' ft \ 



of these most charming sisters, for once by chance, travel- 
ling on T,ake Leman, sh(,' found h(;rself wateliin^ a lady 
who sat at (lit! steamer's vui\, a beautiful yonii<; woman, all 
dressed in pale j^ray, with a lonj^ veil lioatiu}; on the wind, 
who sal mo(ionl<;ss and absorbed, lookinj; towards the dis- 
tant hills, not unlike the vision of some j^uidin;^, wistful 
Ariel at the prow, while the steamer sped its way bdwecMi 
the banks. The story of the l-'rench sisters has j^ained an 
added interest from the remembrance; of those dark, lovely 
eyes, that c:harmin;; countenance, for afterwards, when 1 
knew her l)ett(,'r, the \n(\)[ told me that her mother had been 
a l)omec(|, and had one (; lived with her sistctrs in Mr. Rus 
kin's houK,-. ('ircumslanc(;s had divided th(;m in after-days, 
but all th(; children of the family in turn had Ix.-en brouf^ht 
up to know Mr. Kuskin by nanu;, and to love and appreci- 
ate his books. The lady sent him many messaj;es by me, 
which I delivered in after-days, vvIkmt, alas ! it was from Mr. 
Kirskin himself 1 learned that llie beaiiliful traveller isa- 
belle, he called her — had passed away before her lime to 
those distant hills where,- all oui" journctys en(k 

Kuskin's jubilee should be ( fiinited from the year iS^;^, 
when he tells us he went with his father to a sho|) to enter 
their names as suljscribers to I'rfuit's SIci'tchrs in /''lantirr.<! 
and /t(tl\\ and they were sliown the specimen print ol the 
turreted window over the Moselle at (.'obl(;ntz. "We \LiA 
the book home to Ilerne Hill before the time of our usual 
annual tour, and as my mother watched my father's plea.s- 
ure and mine in lookinj; at the wonderful places, she said, 
why should not we f^o and sec some of them in reality? My 
father hesitated a little, and then, with j^litterinj; eyes, said, 
whynot?" Jlow jilainly one can see the picture ! The little 
family assembled in its quiet after-dinner conclave, the boy 
turnir)g over the pages of his book, the father opening the 
bif; map, the practical mother transforming dreams into re- 



ality. Quiet and monotonous lives lend themselves more 
readily than more brilliant existences to possibilities, to im 
mense events, and this was an event for all the world as well 
as for the Ruskin family. 

Was there ever, will there ever be such a journey again, 
such a combination of comfort, of dawning genius, of actual 
dignity and leisure, of eyes to see, of wheels to roll smoothly 
along the broad roads ? The child no longer sits perched 
on his improvised little bracket-seat, but is one of a digni- 
fied family with a maid and courier travelling as quickly as 
four horses and postilions in huge boots can carry them 
towards the wonder-land beyond the horizon, that country 
of vines, of distant Alpine ranges, of cloud and sky and 
mountain pass, of fair city and glorious art. 

He says: "We found our pleasant rooms always ready, 
our good horses always waiting ; everybody took their hats 
off when we arrived and when we departed ; Salvador pre- 
sented his accounts weekly, and they were settled without a 
word of demur. To all these conditions of luxury and felic- 
ity can the modern steam-puffed tourist conceive the added 
and culminating one that we were never in a hurry?" 

The story of Ruskin's first sight of the Alps is one that 
no one who has ever seen a snowy range will pass over or 
forget. 

"We dined at four as usual, and the evening being en- 
tirely fine, went out to walk, all of us — my father and mother 
and Mary and I. 

" We must have still spent some time in town-seeing, 
for it was drawing towards sunset when we got up to some 
garden promenade, west of the town, I believe, and high 
above the Rhone, so as to command the open country 
across it to the south and west, when suddenly — behold — 
beyond. There was no thought in any of us for a moment 
of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp on 

94 ' 



the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the 
sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought 
or dreamed, the seen walls of Eden could not have been 
more beautiful to us ; not more awful round heaven the 
walls of sacred Death. . . . 'i'hus in perfect health of life 
and fire of heart, not wanting to have anything more than I 
liad. knowing of sorrow only just so much as to make life 
serious to me, not enough to slacken in the least its sinews, 
and with so much of science mixed with feeling as to make 
the sight of the Alps not only the revelation of the beauty 
of the earth, but the opening of the first page of its volume, 
I went down that evening from the garden terrace of Schafif- 
hausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be most 
sacred and useful. 'J'o that terrace and to the shore of the 
Lake of Geneva my heart and faith return to this day in 
every impulse that is yet nobly alive in them, and every 
thought that has in it help or peace." 

It would be too long to transcribe at length, as one would 
like to do, the pages of Pncterita which take us from one 
lovely height to another, from summer to summer, from 
Schaffhausen to Milan, to the " encompassing Alps, the per- 
fectness and purity of the sweet, stately, stainless marble 
against the sky." 

We all build tabernacles here and there in life. It was 
on the Col de la Faucille that John Ruskin erected his in 

"The Col de la Faucille on that day opened to me in 
distinct vision the Holy Land of my future work and true 
home in this world," he says. " Far as the eye could reach 
— that land and its moving or pausing waters ; Arve, and 
his gates of Cluse, and his glacier fountains; Rhone, and 
the infinitude of his sapphire lake, his peace beneath the 
narcissus meads of Vevay, his cruelty beneath the promon- 
tories of Sierre. And all that rose against and melted into 

1)5 



tlie sky, of mountain and mountain snow ; and all that 
living plain, burning with human gladness, studded with 
white houses, a Milky \\'ay of star dwellings cast across its 
sunlit blue." * 

And so we are able to follow the child year by year; we 
see little John grow from out his blue shoes and ribbons, 
77V/ frilled collars and boyish buttons, to rustling dignities of 
silken robe and tasselled cap, and promoted from his niche 
behind the drawing-room chimney-piece to the run of all the 
cloisters of Oxford. I lis father meanwhile returns con- 
tentedly to his desk opposite the brick wall, where he sits 

* Tlic following fac-simile note in allusion to the above was written long after: 



quietly amassing the fortune he spends so generously and 
in so liberal a spirit. 

The history of the Turners is also to be noted : of the 
collection gradually increasing ; of the father's pleasure, of 
the son's delight, in the pictures of Richmond Bridge and 
CJosport ; in the drawing of Winchelsea, "the chief recrea- 
tion of my fatigued hours." Sir John Simon tells a story 
of a visit Ruskin once paid to a sale of pictures, and of his 
return home dispirited, saying there was but one picture he 
had wanted in the whole collection, and that one was already 
sold. And there it was before him. It was his father who 
had bought it, thinking it was one he would be sure to de- 
light in. Ruskin the elder must have had a most unerring 
and remarkable critical faculty, and it was undoubtedly 
from him that John Ruskin inherited his own genius for art. 
'I'here is the record of the paternal gift of ^^200 a year in 
the funds upon the son's coming of age, out of which an- 
other Turner is bought for £^0, " It was not a piece of 
painted paper, but a Welsh castle and village and Snowdon 
in blue cloud that I bought for my seventy pounds." 



VIII 



Ruskin was entered as Gentleman-Commoner at Christ- 
church, Oxford, and came up in January, 1837. "I was 
entered as Gentleman- Commoner without further debate, 
and remember still as if it were yesterday the pride of 
walking out of the Angel Hotel and past University Col- 
lege, holding my father's arm, in my velvet cap and silk 
gown." 

The father and mother had set their hearts on his going 

G 97 



into the Church. He would have made a bishop, said his 
father long years after, with tears in his eyes ; and we may 
read now, indeed, of the first sermon Ruskin ever preached, 
a baby one, in which he describes himself as standing up 
with a red cushion before him, and thumping and preach- 
ing "People be good."* 

Ruskin remained at Oxford until 1840. The story of 
his stay there, of his work, of his friends, is all delightful 
reading ; not the least touching part of it all is the account 
of his mother (with his father's entire acquiescence) leaving 
her home, her daily habits, and establishing herself in lodg- 
ings in the Oxford High Street, so as to be at hand in case 
of need. Ruskin's own filial devotion is also to be admired. 
He tells us that his wishes and his happiness were the chief 
preoccupations of their lives, and he accepts the loving tie 
generously, as all sons do not. Speaking of his degree, 
Ruskin says : " When I was sure I had got through, I went 
out for a walk in the fields north of New College (since 
turned into the Parks), happy in the sense of recovered 
freedom, but extremely doubtful to what use I should put 
it. There 1 was at two -and -twenty, with such and such 
powers, all second-rate except the analytical ones, which 
were as much in embryo as the rest, and which I had no 
means of measuring ; such and such likings hitherto in- 
dulged rather against conscience, and a dim sense of duty 
to myself, my parents, and a daily more vague shadow of 
Eternal Law. What should I be or do .?" This question 
was to be answered very shortly by publication of the first 
volume of Modern Faintcrs. Ikfore coming away from Ox- 
ford I must not omit to quote a curious passage concerning 
Dean Liddell, " one of the rarest types of nobly presenced 
Englishmen, the only man in Oxford in his day who cared 

* Nor, indeed, has he happily ceased to preach this sermon, the text of which brings 
back to one's mind tlie touching words of dying Scott. 

9S 



about ;iil, :m(l wliosc; ' keen ' sayillf;; coiu'criiin;^ Tin iicr, ' lli;il 
ho liad };<)l hold oi a false; ideal,' " is here iiolcd ((aiiioiisly 
ciu)Uf;h) by Kiiskiu as one which would have been eminently 
helpful lo liini at Ihe lime, had it been then impressed upon 
iiim. AitcM' that we come lo Ihe history of that illness after 
overwork whieii sent Kuskin and his |)arents abroad again 
for an indelinite period, travellinj; away by kouen and Tours, 
l)y the Rhone to Avignon, thence liy the Riviera to I'lorence 
and the South, in search of health. There is also this epi- 
taph upon Oxford: "Oxford taught me as much CIreek as 
she could, and though I* think she might have also told me 
that fritillaries grew in Iffley meadow, it was better that she 
left me to hnd them for myself, i must get on," Ik; con- 
tinues, "to the days of opening sight and t^ffi'clivc; labor, 
and to tlie scenes of nobler education, whic h all men who 
keejD their hearts open receive in the end of days." 

It is always interesting to ascertain when a great man be 
gins his life's work; but, after all, it is .scarcely the |)iinting 
of the book or the framing of the picture which puts a date 
to the hour in which the mind ripens or carries out its cf)n- 
ception ; and the casual mention in Prceterita of the publi- 
cation of Modern Painters sIkjws how much of thought and 
feeling had already gone towards the l)Ook, of which the act- 
ual publishing seemed the least memorable part to the au- 
thor. Speaking of the first volume of Modern Pain/erx, he 
only says: "It took the best part of the wint(;r's leisure," 
and dismisses the subject with, " Tlie said first volume must 
have been out by my father's birthday; its success was as- 
sured by the end cjf the year." 

Tlie bfjok made its mark then and there. 'I'liose (pialities 
which Ruskin prefers to call his analytical qualities seem to 
others to be a happy combination of intuition, of industry, 
and vivid imagination. Though the graduate's principles 
and teachings were variously esteemed, every f>ne acknowl- 

99 



edged their importance, and it seems but justice to Mr. 
Ruskin to suggest that he was not altogether accountable 
for the seriousness with which his admirers have sometimes 
accepted his eloquent paradoxes and humors. It is hardly 
fair, perhaps, to look back at the by-gone criticisms of this 
startling and eloquent publication. Reviewers writing long 
after, with experience and knowledge of the road, can drive 
their team steadily, cracking their long whips with a sense 
of dignity and final authority which is admirable for retro- 
spective commonplace ; but how are they to rein in a Pe- 
gasus who has inadvertently found himself harnessed to the 
old coach, and who puts out his wings and flies straight up 
into the air ? Pegasus in his flight does not hesitate to kick 
out right and left, overturning as he goes the various " Van 
Somethings and Bac Somethings," with other shrines that 
we would more gladly sacrifice. Blackwood of those days 
took up the battle in an overbearing and angry spirit. The 
reviewer comes to the defence of the giants and windmills 
this new Don Quixote is attacking right and left — Claude, 
Salvator, Cuyp, Berghem, Ruysdael, etc. "You cannot 
judge with judgment if you have not the sun in your spirit 
and passion in your heart," cries the young champion, deal- 
ing his thrusts. But this is not language to be applied to 
such authorities as those of Blackwood then, or perhaps of 
the Edinburgh nowadays ; and the critics in return strike at 
the graduate with the sun in their eyes, and with passion in 
their words if not in their hearts. 

A second article which appeared in Blackwood some years 
later was far more within the limits of fair and measured 
criticism, allowing the book to be the work of a man of 
power, thinking independently, feeling strongly, and with 
" a mortal aversion to be in a crowd." Meanwhile Fraser, 
in its article on the second edition, declares that " the Ox- 
ford graduate has sought a reputation even in the cannon's 



mouth, has scaled the wall of the Castle of Prejudice, and 
from its embattled parapet waves us to follow." The grad- 
uate's volume " prompts us to leave the conventional for 
the true, and quitting the cant of gallery connoisseurship, to 
find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons 
in stones, and good in everything." From the Ethics of the 
Dust to the Stones of Vefiice, from the Springs of Wandel to 
Deucalion, there is nothing which has once attracted him 
which he does not study with love and intuition, nothing he 
does not use with admiration. This applies most especially 
to his love for Nature. ». For the more human part in art his 
feeling is different altogether, and there his instinct for de- 
struction is often as fierce as his gift for construction is ex- 
quisite when he treats of Nature and her silent belongings. 



IX 



The writer of this little essay certainly cannot pretend 
either to the knowledge or to the infallibility of an art critic, 
and she has therefore ventured to take Ruskin from her own 
point of view only, as a " Light-bearer," as a writer of the 
English language, as a poet in his own measure. How is it 
possible to a man writing, as he says, "with passion," with all 
the vibrating chords of a thousand interests and revelations, 
to be the temperate and dispassionate awarder of that bare 
justice which is all an orthodox critic should bestow? Many 
things, indeed, leave him altogether silent and apparently 
irresponsive ; he does not always contradict the verdict of 
generations, but he accepts it without enthusiasm. The in- 
stinctive form which beauty takes for him is that of Nature 
and her direct influence upon himself. His attitude towards 



Greek art is curiously characteristic of this ; so were his 
first impressions of Rome. 

Very long afterwards Ruskin said of his mother's house- 
keeping arrangements : " I don't think the reader has yet 
been informed that I inherited to the full my mother's love of 
tidiness and cleanliness, and that in Switzerland, next to her 
eternal snows, what I most admired was her white sleeves." 

Was it Ruskin's love of order, then, which caused him to 
suffer so much in Rome, where he waywardly painted the 
rags fluttering in a by-street, and would not give a thought 
to the ancient churches and statues and pictures and ruins ? 
Was it his love of tidiness or his sincerity which made him 
at first write almost cruelly of Italy, of Florence, and of the 
Uffizi, of Siena and its cathedral, " costly confectionery, 
faithless vanity ?" The first sight of St. Peter's, he tells us, 
was to him little more than a gray milestone, announcing 
twenty miles yet of stony road. He ascertained that the 
Stanze could not give him any pleasure. " What the Fo- 
rum or Capitol had been he did not in the least care. Raph- 
ael's 'Transfiguration ' and Domenichino's ' St. Jerome' he 
pronounced, without the smallest hesitation — Domenichi- 
no's a bad picture, and Raphael's an ugly one " (which ver- 
dict I can remember my own father indorsing, as far as the 
Raphael was concerned). I ought also in fairness to add 
that, later on, many of Ruskin's unqualified early criticisms 
are entirely modified and swept away. 

For the second volume of Modern Painters, " not meant 
to be in the least like what it is," Ruskin wanted "more 
Chamouni ;" and further on, feeling that he must know 
more of Italy, see Pau and Florence again, before writing 
another word, he tells his indulgent parents of his wish. 
Turner, of all people, strongly opposed the journey, the 
Continent being then in an angry and disturbed condition ; 
but papa and mamma seem to have agreed. And so the 



new life began for him as we read in the chapters headed 
Campo Santo and Macugnaga. " Serious, enthusiastic, 
worship and wonder and work ,• up at six, drawing, study- 
ing, thinking; breaking bread and drinking wine at inter- 
vals: homeward the moment the sun went down." "The 
days that began in the cloister of the Campo Santo at Pisa 
ended by my getting upon the roof of Santa Maria della 
Spina, and sitting in the sunlight that tranfused the warm 
marble of its pinnacles till the unabated brightness went 
down beyond the arches of the Ponte a Mare, the few foot- 
steps and voices of the twilight silent in the streets, and 
the city and her mountains stood mute as a dream beyond 
the soft eddying of Arno." We may judge by these illus- 
trations to his life what sort of material it was that Ruskin 
himself put into his noble books. 

It was between the publication of the first and second 
volumes of Modern Painters that Ruskin came under Car- 
lyle's influence. Long years afterwards Carlyle himself, 
writing to Emerson, says: "There is nothing going on 
among us as notable to me as those fierce lightning-bolts 
Ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring into the black 
world of Anarchy all around him. No other man in Eng- 
land that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, 
falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man 
ought to have. Unhappily he is not a strong man — one 
might say a weak man rather — and has not the least pru- 
dence of management, though if he can hold out for anoth- 
er fifteen years or so, he may produce, even in this way, 
a great effect or so. God grant it, say I." 

I heard a pretty account once from Mr. Alfred Lyttel- 
ton of a visit paid by Ruskin to Carlyle in the familiar 
room in Cheyne Walk, with the old picture of Cromwell on 
the wall, and Mrs. Carlyle's little tables and pretty knick- 
knacks still in their quiet order. Mr. Ruskin had been ill 



not long before, and as he talked on of something he cared 
about, Mr. Lyttelton said his eyes lighted up, and he seem- 
ed agitated and moved. Carlyle stopped him short, saying 
the subject was too interesting. "You must take care," he 
said, with that infinite kindness which Carlyle could show ; 
"you will be making yourself ill once more." And Ruskin, 
quite simply, like a child, stopped short. " You are right," 
he said, calling Carlyle "master," and then went on to talk 
of something else, as dull, no doubt, as anything could be 
that Ruskin and Carlyle could talk about together. 

In the first volume of Prceterita there is one particular 
passage about Carlyle to which many of us will demur. 

Ruskin himself this time is now quoting from the Emer- 
son correspondence, and he says: "I find at page i8 this 
to me entirely disputable, and to my thought, so far as un- 
disputed, much blamable and pitiable exclamation of my 
master's : ' Not till we can think that here and there one 
is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth 
become a peopled garden.' My training, as the reader has 
perhaps enough perceived, produced in me the precisely 
opposite sentiment. My times of happiness had always 
been when nobody was thinking of me. . . . The garden at 
home was no waste place to me because I did not suppose 
myself an object of interest either to the ants or the but- 
terflies, and the only qualification of the delight of my even- 
ing walk at Champagnole was the sense that my father and 
mother tvere thinking of me, and would be frightened if I 
was ten minutes late for tea. . . . 

" I don't mean in the least that I could have done with- 
out them. They were to me much more than Carlyle's wife 
to him. . . . But that the rest of the world was waste to him 
unless he had admirers in it is a sorry state of sentiment 
enough, and I am somewhat tempted for once to admire 

the exactly opposite temper of my own soHtude. My en- 

104 



tire delight was in observing without being observed ; if I 
could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely 
interested in men and in their ways as I was interested in 
marmots and chamois and in trouts. . . . The living habita- 
tion of the world, the grazing and nesting in it, the spirit- 
ual power of the air, the rocks, the waters — to be in the 
midst of it, and rejoice, and wonder at ; . . . this was the 
essential love of nature in me, this the root of all that I 
have usefully become." 

As I have already said, this peculiar sense of solemn 
responsibility to nature »and to mankind, and irresponsibil- 
ity to individuals, is most specially to be noted in Ruskin ; 
more specially in the young Ruskin, who writes as people 
of strong imaginations write when the impulse is on them, 
realizing at the moment but one aspect of a feeling. But 
though he writes in this detached and lofty fashion, every 
page of his memoir vibrates with the warm light of a united 
home, where exist mutual love, confidence, sympathy, with- 
out which half the charm of the whole picture would be gone. 



X 

At Macugnaga, Ruskin, maturing his second volume, 
seems to have lived in good company, with a couple of 
Shakespeare's plays and his own thoughts, but not to have 
enjoyed his solitude so much as might have been expected 
from his theories. Mr. Boxall and Mr. Hardinge presently 
joined him for a time, and then came another serious ill- 
ness, after which the second volume of Modeni Painters was 
published, in 1846. 

This second volume concerns the schools of Italy and 
its histories of art, and raised as much indignation as the 



first had done, though less irritation. Critics thanked 
Heaven openly that they were publicans and still able to 
admire, not Pharisees rejecting right and left. Then fol- 
lowed another beautiful sermon and more parables, " The 
book I called The Seven Lamps was to show that certain 
right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic 
powers by which all good architecture, without exception, 
had been produced." llie Stones of Venice appeared be- 
tween the years 185 1 and 1853, and had from beginning 
to end no other aim than to show that the Gothic archi- 
tecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all 
its features, a state of pure national faith ami of dcnnestic 
virtue, and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out 
of, and indicated in all its features, a state of concealed 
national infidelity and of domestic corruption. 

Again and again, as we read our Ruskin, the truth of 
his father's saying occurs to one, " He should have been 
a bishop !" Everything has a moral to him and a meaning. 
" In these books of mine, their distinctive character as es- 
says on art is their bringing everything to a root in human 
passion or in human hope," he says in Modern J\xinters 
(vol. v.). The law of perfectness is one of his favorite 
texts, one that he would have us all pursue. He culls and 
he chooses at will, dwelling upon each detail which illus- 
trates his own vast and lovely conception of things as they 
should be — as they w/i,'///' be for us if we were all Ruskins ; 
and the chief tlanger for his disciples is that of seeing de- 
tails too vividly, and missing the whole, 'i'here is also all 
the extraordinary inlluence of his personality in his teach- 
ing. Oracles such as Mill and Spencer veil their faces 
when they utter. Poets and orators like Ruskin uncover 
their heads as they adilress their congregations. 

Ruskin has not only words at his connnand. but deli- 
cate hands. Look at the sketches and drawings in the 



latter volumes of Modern Painters. How eloquent and 
graceful they are, whether it is indicated motion or shad- 
ow, whether clouds or spiral leaf and upspringing branch ! 

When Ruskin records his past, it is as often as not by 
the sketches he has taken along the way that he marks his 
progress. And how true the saying is that nothing else — no 
descriptions — ever bring back a former state of mind and be- 
ing as an old sketch will do ! Sometimes one's old self actual- 
ly seems to come up and take it out of one's hand. Only last 
night, apropos of these sketches of Ruskin's, and of a new 
portfolio of them lately pwblished, I heard no less an author- 
ity than the Slade Professor at Cambridge saying that, with 
all the credit Professor Ruskin has justly won as a master of 
English diction, he has scarcely gained as much as he de- 
served for the exquisite character of his actual drawing. 

As one looks down the list of Ruskin's writings* one can 

* It may be convenient to give the following list of Mr. Ruskin's works, taken 
from Men of the Time, and from the fly-leaves of Mr. George Allen : 

Poems. Friendship's Offering. 1835 to Unto this Last. Coriikill Magazine. 

1843. 1S60-1862. 

Modern Painters. Vol. I., 1843. Munera Pulveris. Frazer's Magazine. 
Modern Painters. Vol. II., 1846. 1862-1863. 

Art. Quarterly Rcvieiv, June, 1847, Lord Notes on the Alps. 

Lindsay's Christian Art March, 1848, Cestus of Aglaia. 1865. 

Eastlake on tlic History of Painting. Sesame and Lilies. 1865. 

Seven Lamps of Architecture. Ethics of the Dust. 1865. 

King of the (Joldcn River. 1849. Illus- Crown of Wild Olive. 1866. 

trated by R. Doyle. Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne. 

Stones of Venice. Vol. III., '5i-'53. 1851. Queen of the Air. i86g. 

Lectures on Architecture and Painting. Lectures on Art. 1871 to 1878. 

1853. Fors Clavigera. 

Ciotto and his Works in Padua, 1854, for Aratra Pentelice. 1872. 

the Arundel Society. The Relation between Michael Angelo 
Notes on the Royal Academy. F'ive parts. and Tintoret. 1872. 

1855 to 1859. The Eagle's Nest. 1872. 

Modern Painters. Vol. III., 1856. Ariadne Florentina. 1873-1876. 

Modern Painters. Vol. IV., 1856. Love's Meinie. 1873. 

Notes on the Turner Collection. 1857. Val d' Arno. 1874. 

Political Economy of Art. 1857. Two Proserpina. 1875-1876. 

Lectures. 1859-1860. Deucalion. 1875-1878. 

The Two Paths. (Lectures on Art.) Mornings in Florence. 1875-1877. 

Modern Painters. Vol. V., i860. P.ibliotheca Pastorum. 1877. 

.Sir Joshua Holbein. C or nhill Magazine. Prx-terita. (Still publishing.) 1888. 

i860. 



roughly read the story of his Hfe. In the early numbers of 
the Cornhill Magazine his papers on political economy ap- 
peared, and it must have been about that time that he en- 
tered into his partnership with Miss Octavia Hill, resulting 
in one of the most important and interesting movements of 
the day. 

There is a short article by Miss Hill in a by-gone Fort- 
nightly Revieiv, describing the beginning of what has led to 
so much. The article is called " Cottage Property in Lon- 
don." The said cottages, begrimed, and overcrowded by 
the dreary London peasantry, were whitewashed and drain- 
ed with the help of Mr. Ruskin's ;^7oo, and relet again by 
Miss Hill to the poor people themselves, of whom she al- 
ways writes with admirable discernment and sympathy. 
As she tells of her tenants, of their fortitude, their power 
of hope, their simple, entire confidence, their extraordinary 
patience. Miss Hill speaks with the knowledge that people 
bring whose genius is in the work into which they throw 
their hearts, and Mr. Ruskin was the first to recognize her 
gift. 

" I had not great ideas of what must be done," she says. 
" My strongest endeavors were to be used to rouse habits 
of industry and effort. The plan was one which depended 
on just governing more than on helping. The first point 
was to secure such power as would enable me to insist on 
some essential sanitary arrangements. I laid the scheme 
before Mr. Ruskin, who entered into it most warmly. He 
at once came forward with all the money necessary, and 
took the whole risk of the undertaking upon himself. He 
showed me, however, that it would be far more useful if it 
could be made to pay — that a workingman ought to be able 
to pay for his own house." . . . 

I found a letter among my father's papers the other day 
which must have been written by Mr. Ruskin about this 

io8 



time, and as it bears upon one of liis many theories, and is 
interesting and characteristic, I will insert it here. It con- 
cerned an old friend of my father's, Monsieur Louis Marvy, 
who spent one winter in Young Street, He was an engrav- 
er by profession ; he had, as I believe, been mixed up in 
some of the revolutionary episodes of 1848. He was a very 
charming and gentle person, in delicate health. He used 
to work hour after hour at his plates. He lived quietly in 
our house, chiefly absorbed by his work. He died quite 
young, not long after his return to France. Mr. Ruskin's 
letter refers in a measurfc to this by -gone episode, and I 
have his permission to transcribe it : 

"Denmark Hill, 2isi December, i860. 

"Dear Mr. Thackeray, — I think (or shoukl think if I did not 
know) that you are quite right in this general law about lecturing, though, 
until I knew it, I did not feel able to refuse the letter of request asked 
of nie. 

" The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a 
matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the 
time or face to talk to you of it. 

" In somebody's drawing-room ages ago you were speaking accident- 
ally of M. de Marvy. I expressed my great obligation to him, on which 
you said that I could now prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow, 
which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the cir- 
cumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the gen- 
eral impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and 
hardness of their hearts. 

" The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. 
I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one 
who will help at a hopeful pinch, and when I have choice I nearly al- 
ways give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely 
helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would not for a distressed 
author, and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but 
not — unless I had no other object — his widow after he was gone. In a 
word, I like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen. This, if 
you ever find out anything of my private life, you will know to be true; 

log 



but I shall never feel comfortable, nevertheless, about that Marvy busi- 
ness unless you send to me for ten pounds for the next author, or artist, 
or widow of either, whom you want to help. 

" And with this weight at last off my mind, I pray you to believe me 
always faithfully, respectfully yours, J. Ruskin. 

" All best wishes of the season to you and your daughters." 

And my father's daughter may be perhaps forgiven for 
adding that there are few among us who will not sympa- 
thize as much with Mr. Ruskin when he breaks his theories 
as when he keeps to them. I don't know if it is fair to 
quote the story I heard at Coniston, long after, of the 
man who had grossly lied and cheated at Brantwood for 
years, and whose wages Mr. Ruskin went on paying, be- 
cause he could not give him a character, and could not 
let him and his children starve. 



XI 



It may be here as well to say a few words of Mr. Rus- 
kin's public work. In the statement of the purposes of St. 
George's Guild published by him he explains the two chief 
objects of the society : — Firstly, agricultural work, reclaim- 
ing waste lands, and the encouragement of manual labor 
without the help of steam (" a cruel and furious waste of 
fuel to do what every stream and breeze are ready to do"); 
Secondly, the building of museums and schools of art and 
study. " I continually see subscriptions of ten, fifteen, or 
twenty thousand pounds for new churches. Now a good 
clergyman never wants a church. He can say all his pa- 
rishioners essentially need to hear in any of his parishion- 
ers' best parlors or upper chambers, or, if these are not large 



enough, in the market-place or harvest-field. What does 
he want with altars — was the Lord's Supper eaten on one ? 
— what with pews — useless rents for the pride of them; 
what with font and pulpit that the next way -side brook 
or mossy bank cannot give him ?". . . In order to form 
wholesome habits they (the young) must be placed under 
wholesome conditions. For the pursuit of any intellectual 
inquiry to advantage not only leisure must be granted them 
but quiet. . . . The words "school," "college," "univer- 
sity," rightly understood, imply the leisure necessary for 
learning, the companionship necessary for sympath}^ and 
wilfulness restrained by the daily vigilance and firmness of 
tutors and masters. 

The writer has not seen the museum at Sheffield, but 
happening to admire the work of a young water-color paint- 
er only a day ago, and to ask where he had studied, she was 
told that he had studied with nature for a teacher ; but that 
besides working in this great academy he had also greatly 
profited by Mr. Ruskin's museum at Sheffield, where the 
most interesting and valuable art treasures are to be found 
in a couple of rooms opening on each side of the door of a 
road -side cottage. At one time Mr. Ruskin intended to 
build an art museum for Sheffield, and commissioned Mr. 
William Marshall to prepare the plans. I do not know why 
this scheme was never carried beyond the designs. Oxford 
first elected him to the Slade Professorship. Cambridge 
also made signals of respect and admiration, and he was 
elected Rede Lecturer in 1867. But it is difficult to imag- 
ine Ruskin at Cambridge ; Oxford seems to belong far more 
to his genius, to his emotional gifts, his playful mediaeval 
and romantic views of life. I have heard of him entertain- 
ing his guests as hospitably in his rooms at Corpus as 
at Brantwood by the waters of the lake. A friend de- 
scribed to us the well -served breakfast, ample beyond 



all appetite of host or guest, and Raskin, fearing to dis- 
appoint the cook, sending friendly and appreciative mes- 
sages. " A very nice relish for breakfast, sir," says the 
scout, offering some particular dish. "A very nice relish 
at any time," says Ruskin, kindly, refusing, "and tell tirie 
cook I said so." 

The following note of welcome shows what trouble Brant- 
wood takes for its friends : 

" King's Arms, Lancaster, Saturday. 

" Dear Mr. , — I have left orders to make you comfortable ; it 

is just possible, after these two days of darkness, you may even have a 
gleam of sun on Monday morning. 

" Eleven train to Carnforth Junction, where change carriages for Ul- 
verstone, where getting out, you will, I doubt not, see a dark post- 
chaise, into which getting, an hour and a half's pleasant drive brings 
you to Brantwood, where I hope you may be not uncomfortable what- 
ever the weather. 

" Vours faithfully, J. Rvskin." 

Not the least among Ruskin's gifts to his fellow-men are 
the beautiful copies of beautiful pictures which he has had 
executed for the students at Sheffield and elsewhere : the 
best copies that the best talent art and knowledge could 
produce, bestowed with like liberality and sympathy upon 
those who have no means of reaching the originals. The 
following letters relating to this work will be found interest- 
ing. One is struck by the care for the work and the interest 
in the worker, to whose great kindness I owe this record: 

"Oxford, 20//: May, 1873. 

" My dear , — I have your interesting letter, with the (to me 

very charming) little sketch of ' The Peace.' By the Virtues o>i the left 
I meant what perhaps my memory fails in placing there — on the left- 
hand wall, standing with your back to the window. ' The Peace ' is 
opposite window, isn't it ? I can only say, do any face that strikes you. 



Ill tliis composition I care more for completeness of record than for ac- 
curate copying. There is nothing in it that I esteem exquisite as paint- 
ing; i)ut all is invaluable as design and emotion. Do it as thoroughly 
as you can pleasantly to yourself. For me, the Justice and Concord are 
the importantest. As you have got to work comfortably on it, don't 
hurry. Do it satisfactorily ; and then to Assisi, where quite possibly I 
may join you, though not for a month or six weeks. 

" Keep mc well in knowledge of your health and movements (writing 
now to Coniston), and believe me 

" Very faithfully yours, J, Ruskin. 

..." I shall soon be writing to the good moidis at Assisi; give them 
my love always. 

"Do not spare fee's to cusfbdes, and jnit them down separately to me. 

" People talk so absurdly about bribing. An Italian cannot know 
at first anything about an Englishman but that he is cither stingy or gen- 
erous. The money gift really opens his heart, if he has one. You can 
do it in that case without money, indeed, eventually, but it is amazing 
how many ]-)eople can have good (as well as bad) brought out of them by 
gifts, and no otherwise." 

"London, i^llijimc, 1873. 

" My dkar , — I am very glad to have your letters, and to see 

that you are on the whole well, and hajjpy in your work. One's friends 
never do write to one when one's at Siena ; somehow it is impossible to 
suppose a letter ever gets there. 

"You may stay at your work there as long as you (inrl necessary for 
easy comjiletion. It will be long before I get to Assisi. 

" I don't care about anything in the Villa Spanocchi. All my pleas- 
ant thoughts of it — or any other place nearly — are gone. Do ' Tlir; 
Peace ' as thorcnighly as possible, now you are at it. 

" I have inten.se sympathy with you about .Sunday, but fancy my con- 
science was unusually morbid. I am never comfortable on the day. Of 
course the general slioi)-sluitting and dismalness in England adds to the 
efTect of it. 

" Your day is admirably laid out, except that; in your walk after 
four you go to look at pictures. You ought to rest in changed thoughts 
as much as possible, to get out on' the green baid<s and brows, and think 
of nothing but what the leaves and winds say. 

" I have nothing to tell you of myself that is pleasant ; not much that 

H lis 



is specially otherwise. The weather has been frightful in London. It 
was better at Coniston, but it appalls me ; it is a plague of darkness such 
as I never believed nature could inflict or sufler. 

" Always affectionately yours, _ J. Ruski.n." 

"Hhrne Hill, -z^d Aftril, 1882. 

..." Tliat is a good passage of Leonardo's, but if you had read my 
Oxford lectures you would find their whole initiatory line and shade 
practice is (with distinct announcement of his authority) based on his 
book. I had read every word of it with care before I finished I\Iod. F." 



XII 



Sir Charles Newton writes on one occasion : " I spent 
last night with Ruskin, and very delightful it was. He is 
now taking that larger view of art which I always expected 
he would, and begins to regard Greek art from the point of 
view in which it ought to be looked at, and was regarded 
by the Greeks themselves." This letter was shown me by 
the kindest of friends, whose own noble inspiration is a 
blessing and a light to the age. Watts has often described 
his discussions with Ruskin during their long and intimate 
companionship. Fhat Ruskin is remorseless all his friends 
must allow, but he is remorseless to himself as soon as a 
conviction is borne in upon him. 

Here is a charming example of a recantation in a letter 
to Mr. Burne-Jones : 

"Venice, i-^th May, 1869. 
" My dearkst Tneu, — There's nothing here like Carpaccio! There's 
a little bit of humble-pie for you ! 

" Well, the fact was, I had never once looketl at him, having classed 
him in glance and thought with ("icntile Bellini and^other men of the 

"4 



more or less incipient and iianl schools, and Tintoret went better with 
clouds and hills. But this Carpaccio is a new world to me. . . . I've 

only seen the Academy ones yet, and am going this morning ( 

cloudless light) to your St. Cjcorge of the Schiavoni ; but I must send 
this word first to catch post. 

" From your loving J. R. 

" I don't give up my 'lintoret, but his dissoluteness of expression 
into drapery and shadow is too licentious for me now." 

It is to Watts I also owe the following letters, whicii 
are so interesting in themselves, and do such honor to the 
candor and love of troth of the recipients, that I will set 
them down without comment. The letters recall that past 
vision of Little Holland House and its gardens, where for 
many years Watts, "the Signor," as his friends all call him, 
dwelt on, recording the generation of noble people passing 
by, as well as the beautiful ideals of his own mind, working 
day after day quietly from dawn of light to afternoon in 
that home of so much vivid life and original color, which 
has left the remembrance of kind deeds and happy, gracious 
ways shining like a track on the waters. 

".Saturday V.\VM\nc,,2<)th Se/>tc7nber, iS6o. 

" Dear Watts, — I am very glad to have your letter to-night, having 
been downhearted lately and unable to write to my friends, yet glad of 
being remembered by them. I have kept a kind letter of Mrs. Prinsep's 
by me ever so long. It came too late to be answered before the birth- 
day of which it told me. 

" I will come and sit whenever and wherever and as long as you 
like. I have nothing whatever to do, and don't mean to have. I hope 
to be at National Gallery on Tuesday [erased], Wednesday [erased ; see 
end of note], and Thursday afternoons, two to four, not exactly working, 
but wondering. I entirely feel with you that there is no dodge in Titian. 
It is simply right doing with a care and dexterity alike unpractised among 
us nowadays. It is drawing with paint as tenderly as you do with chalk. 
... I suspect that Titian depended on states and times in coloring more 

"5 



than we do — that he left such and sucli coloi-s for such nnd such times 
always before retouchinsj, and so on ; hut this you would not call dodt^e 
— would you? — but merely perfect knowledge of means. It struck me 
in looking at your group with child in the Academy that you depended 
too much on blending and too little on handling color ; that you were 
not simple enough nor quick enough to do all you felt ; nevertheless it 
was very beautiful. 1 should think you were tormented a little by hav- 
ing too much feeling. 

" If it is fine to-morrow I have iMoniised to take a diivc. Init the 
,\Y<-<'w./ fine day, whatever that niay be this week. 1 shall bo at rratalgar 
Square,' 

" FfbrudKV 5. 1S61, 

" Mv pr AK Waits, — Kind thanks for writing to ask for me. 1 am 
not unwell materially, but furiously sulky and very quiet over mv work, 
and mean to be so, and having been hitherto a rather voluble and dem- 
onstrative person, people think Vm ill. I'm not cheerful, certainlv, and 
don't see how anybody in their senses can be. 

" I did i\ot say — did I ? — that yon were not \o aim at all (]ualities ; 
but not all at oner. Titian was born of strong race, and with every con- 
ceivable Iniman advantage, and probably before he was twelve years old 
knew all that could be done with oil-painting. //V are under everv 
conceivable human disadvantage, and we must be content to go slowlv. 
If you try at present to get all Titian's qualities, you will assui-edly get 
none. Vou not only //i/rr seen Titians and Correggios which united all, 
but I don't suppose you ever saw a true Titian or Correggio which did 
fiot unite all. But that does not in the least warrant you in trying at 
once to do the same — you have many things to discover which thev 
learned with their alphabet, many things to cure yourself of which their 
master never allowed them to fall into habit of. For instance, from long 
drawing with chalk point you have got a mottled and broken execution, 
and have no power of jiroperly modulating the brush. Well, the way 
to cure yourself of that is not by trying for Titian or Correggio, whose 
motlulations are so exquisite that they jierpetually blend invisibly with 
the point-work, but take a piece of absolute modulation — the head of 
the kneeling figure in Sir Joshua's * Three Graces ' at Kensington, for 
instance — and do it twenty times over and over again, restricting your- 
.self wholly to his number of touches and thereabouts. Then vou will 
feel exactly where you are, and what is the obstacle in that direction to 

u6 



he vanquished ; you will feel progress every day, and be happy in it ; 
while when you try for everything, you never know what is stopping 
you. Again, the chalk drawing has materially damaged your perception 
of the subtlest qualities of local color. When a form is shown by a 
light of one color and a reflex of another, both equal in depth, if we are 
drawing in chalk we must exaggerate either one or the other, or the form 
must be invisible. The habit of exaggeration is fatal to the color vision; 
to conquer it you should paint the purest and subtlest colored objects on 
a small scale till you can realize them thoroughly. I say on a small 
scale; otherwise the eye does not come to feel the value of points of 
hue. This exercise, nearly the reverse of the modulation exercise, could 
riot be healthily carried on together with it. And so on with others. 

" I write with an apparency presumptuous posiliveness, but my own 
personal experience of every sort of feebleness is so great that I have a 
right to do so on points connected with it. 

" Sincere regard to all friends. 

" Ever affectionately yours, J. R." 

" Denmark Hill, S. , 
" Wednesday, z^th 7uly, iVA. 

" My dear Watts, — I heard to-day from Edward* that he thought 
you would like to come and see me — or me to come to you. 

" You have not been here for ever so long. Can you come out any 
day to breakfast? — and we'll have a nice talk — or would you rather I 
should come in the afternoon ? I rarely stir in the morning. I want to 
see you. I've been very ill and sad lately, or should have managed it. 

" Send me just a line to say what day you could come, or see me. 
" Ever affectionately yours, J. Rt'SKI.s'. 

" G. Watts, Esq. 

" Ned says you have been doing beautiful things. And therefore I 
should like to come, as you won't exhibit and leave Maclise's ' Death of 
Nelson ' to edify the public of taste, but I think you would enjoy one 
picture here." 

And so, as one thinks of it all, of the people living round 
about us shaping their own and other people's lives, one 
admires and wonders at this unending variety of power and 

• Mr. E. Burne-Jones. 
117 



voice of apprehension, of teaching, of opinion. Few things 
strike one more among the chief men who come to the front 
— not by chance, but by force of hard work and natural 
right — than their good-fellowship, their trust in one another, 
and their genuine appreciation of each other, whatever their 
opinions may be. It is more commonly the second rate 
among us who are critical and impatient. And this is in- 
deed the secret of the rule of those Captains of our race 
who arc Captains by reason of their swifter knowledge and 
insight, their greater courage and fairness. 

We have all been reading lately of generous Darwin and 
his friends. Genuine excellence is distinguished by this 
mark, that it bc/ongs to all mankind, says Goethe, writing to 
Carlvle. Carlyle himself, with his flashing wit and his pas- 
sionate flashing words, discriminates even while he grum- 
bles. Ruskin has phases of impression, but his noble in- 
stinct is for the truth, although the examples he gives at 
times seem so changeable, and his systems of instruction 
almost hopeless for students who have to live during their 
short lives ; to pay their way and their long bills as well as 
to study their art. Ruskin's own peculiar system is in real- 
ity almost more of a trial of patience than of skill; he has a 
series of pitfalls for unwary students, among which the white 
jam pots he used to prescribe to those of Oxford may be 
counted. But though his practice may be fanciful, his light 
is a beacon indeed, steadily Hashing from the rock upon 
which it is set. The rays fall u[H)n uncertain waves, change 
their color, turn and return, dazzle or escape you altogether ; 
but the longer you look at them, the more you realize their 
truth and their beauty. You can't take up a book with any 
one of the fanciful charming names, whether the Queen of 
the Air, or Sesame and Lilies, or the Crown of Wild Olive, 
that you don't hnd conscience and good common-sense 
wrapped up and hidden among the flowers. Tlie shrewd- 

ii8 



ness, the wisdom of it all strikes us as much as the variety 
of his interests. 

" A few words," he says somewhere, " well chosen and 
well distinguished, will do work that a thousand cannot, 
when every one is acting equivocally in the function of an- 
other. Yes; and words, if they are not watched, will do 
deadly work sometimes, masked words — unjust stewards of 
men's ideas." 

J low true is this sentence concerning the idle and the 
busy: "All rich people are not idle. There are the idle 
rich and the idle poor, ^s there are the busy rich and the 
busy poor. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten 
thousand a year ; many a man of fortune is busier than his 
errand-boy." 

Here is his definition of a true Churcli : "Wherever one 
hand meets another helpfully — that is the Holy or Mother 
Church which ever is or ever shall be." 

About books : "Will you go and gossip with your house- 
maid or your stable-boy when you may talk with queens 
and kings.'' But we cannot read unless our minds are fit. 
Avarice, injustice, vulgarity, base excitement, all unfit us. 
Jieware of reading in order to say, 'Thus Milton thought,' 
rather than, 'Thus I thought in misreading Milton.' " 

Here is another hint respecting books for women : 
"Whether novels or history or poetry be read, they should 
be chosen not for what is out of them, but for what is in 
them. The chance and scattered evil that may here and 
there haunt and hide itself in a powerful book never does 
any harm to a noble girl, but the emptiness of an author 
oppresses her and his amiable folly degrades her." On 
education, as on the relations between men and women, he 
has a thousand delightful things to say. '• Keep a fairy or 
two for your children," says kind Ruskin ; and doubtless 
acting upon this friendly hint, the School Board has 



adopted that charming history of the King of the Golden 
River as a standard prize book. 

It is pretty to read of the way in whicli Ruskin adjusts 
the different offices of the husband and the wife. The 
woman's a guiding, not a determining function. The man 
is the doer, the creator ; the woman's power is for rule and 
not for battle. Her great function is praise ; she enters into 
no contest, but adjudges the crown. 



XIII 

I AM told by Mr. Allen that Mr. Ruskin thinks that the 
book which will stand the longest is the Crown of Wild 
Olive. Sesame and Lilies is, and most deservedly so, a favor- 
ite book with the public. Who can ever forget the closing 
passages, in which the poet, looking round about, seeing 
the need of the children even greater than that of their 
elders, bids women go forth into the garden and tend the 
flowerets lying broken, with their fresh leaves torn ; set 
them in order in their little beds, fence them from the fierce 
wind — " fiowers with eyes like yours, with thoughts like 
yours." Was ever a lesson more tenderly given } 

How true is this description of Holman Hunt : "To Ros- 
setti the Old and New Testaments were only the greatest 
poems he knew. But to Holman Hunt the story of the 
New Testament, when once his mind entirely fastened on 
it, became what it was to an old Puritan, . . . not merely a 
Reality, not merely the greatest of Realities, but the only 
Reality." 

I have perhaps quoted too much already, but I cannot 
help givang a passage from the Stones of Venice, wliich is 



written in a different key, a very grave and noble one. He 
says : " The passions of mankind are partly protective, 
partly beneficent, like the chaff and grain of the corn, but 
none without their use, none without nobleness when seen 
in balanced unity with the rest of the spirit they are charged 
to defend. The passions of which the end is the contin- 
uance of the race, the indignation which is to arm it against 
injustice or strengthen it to resist wanton injury, and the 
fear which lies at the root of prudence, reverence, and awe, 
are all honorable and beautiful so long as man is regarded 
in his relations to the esisting world." 

Another lesson which Ruskin would impress upon us all 
is one more easy to grasp, and it applies to the whole con- 
duct of life, whether in art, or in nature and natural phe- 
nomena. " The seed the sower sows grows up according 
to its kind : let us sow good seed with care and liberality." 
When Ruskin tells us that modesty, piety, humility, and a 
number of somewhat unexpected attributes are to be found 
in the curl of a leaf, in the painted background of a picture, 
or in the arch of a window, a moment's thought will show 
how true his words are. Qualities take different forms in 
their exercise: Modesty in design would mean care and 
accuracy ; Humility would mean interest in the object 
copied, not a vulgar desire for self-glorification and for 
rapid effect ; Piety represents that sweet sense which some 
call sentiment. 

Then again listen to Ruskin writing upon a dii'ferent 
theme, that of Shakespeare's chivalry. " Note broadly in 
the outset that Shakespeare has no heroes, whereas there is 
hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast 
in grave hope and errorless purpose. Cordelia, Desde- 
mona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Katherine, Per- 
dita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last and perhaps 
loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless, conceived in the highest 



lieroic type of humanity. Then observe, secondly, the ca- 
tastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or 
fault of a man ; the redemption, if there be any, is by the 
wisdom or virtue of a woman." 

One of Shakespeare's heroines (a Helen happily belong- 
ing to our own time) has dedicated to Ruskin one of her 
charming renderings of her not forgotten parts. " She " 
(Lady Martin) "has shown her beautiful sympathy with 
character in choosing Beatrice," Ruskin writes in return to 
Sir Theodore Martin, " and she may be assured that I am 
indeed listening with all my lieart to every word she will 
say." And then again to Lady Martin herself: "I thought 
I knew Beatrice of any lady by heart, but you have made 
her still more real and dear to me, especially by the little 
sentences in which you speak of your own feelings in cer- 
tain moments in acting her. You have made me wretched 
because Beatrice is not at Brantwood." ..." I should like 
a pomegranate or two in Juliet's balcony," he adds. I take 
up another letter to Sir Theodore Martin at hazard, and 
read : " You are happy at Llangollen in this season. The 
ferns and grass of its hills are far more beautifully and soft- 
ly opposed than on ours." How few of us know how to 
think with such vividness ! — we think of a valley, of a 
mountain, of the skies beyond it, but we don't instinctively 
see the details ; we don't contrast the hue of the ferns and 
of the turf of Cumberland and of Wales, perceiving it all 
with that instantaneous conception which is genius, in 
short. 

I once heard a well-known man of science speaking of 
Ruskin ; some one had asked him whether Ruskin or Goethe 
had done most for science. Sir John Lubbock replied that 
Ruskin undoubtedly had done very much more valuable 
work than Goethe ; and that without any pretensions to 
profound scientific knowledge, he had an extraordinary 



natural gift for observation, and seemed t(j know Ijy instinct 
7v/iat to observe, wliat was important amid so mucii that 
was fanciful and poetical; and tiien he went on to quote 
the description of the swallow from Love's Meinie, one of the 
loveliest things imaginable, and which it would not be diffi- 
cult to apply to Ruskin's own genius — so swift, so unerring 
in its flight, so incalculable, so harmonious and fascinating 
always. 

Mr. Ruskin is a figure standing out distinguished among 
the many figures and characters which make up the dramatis 
personce of our time ; andthis being so, legends gather round 
him as clouds gather round the peak of his own Coniston 
Old Man. One story I have vaguely heard which describes 
a Haroun-al-Raschid expedition of his through the streets 
of London, a flight from the mosque to the jeweller's store, 
where the loveliest gems are heaped before him, of which he 
can best tell the secrets. Then from the jeweller's store to 
the pastry-cook's, where in an inner room a table is spread, 
not with the cream tarts of fiction, but with the British fare 
of roast mutton and potatoes, and where, as the poet lunches, 
salting his food meanwhile with his enchanting talk, little 
by little all the people already in the shop leaving their buns 
and sandwiches, gather round to listen. Another legend, 
which I cannot vouch for either, but which seems suitable 
somehow, begins with a dream, in which Ruskin dreamt 
himself a Franciscan friar. Now I am told that when he 
was at Rome there was a beggar on the steps of the Pincio 
who begged of Mr. Ruskin every day as he passed, and who 
always received something. On one occasion the grateful 
beggar suddenly caught the out-stretched hand and kissed 
it. Mr. Ruskin stopped short, drew his hand hastily away, 
and then, with a sudden impulse, bending forward, kissed 
the beggar's cheek. The next day the man came to Mr. 
Ruskin's lodging to find him, bringing a gift, which he offered 



with to;us in his ovos. It was ;t roHc. ho saiil. a shrcil ot 
brown cloth which had onco toiineil part ot" the robe of St. 
Francis. Mr. Riiskin romcniborod his cheani when tlie poor 
beggar hrmight forth his relic, and thence, so I am told. 
came his pilgrimage to the convent of St. Francis Assisi, 
where he beheUl those frescos by Giotto which seemed to 
him more lo\elv than anydung I'intoret himself had ever 
produced. 1 personally should like to believe that the 
mendicant was St. Francis appearing in the garb of a beggar 
ttWiis great disciple, to whom also had been granted the gift 
of interpreting the voice of Nature. 

We are all apt to feel at times that meat is more than life, 
and the raiment more ih.tn the soul ; at such times let us 
turn to Ruskin. He sees the glorious world as we have 
never known it. or have perhaps forgotten to look upon it. 
He takes the first example to liaml ; the stones, which hv 
makes into bread; the dust and scraps and ilry sticks ami 
moss which are lying to his hand ; he is so penetrated with 
the gliirv and beauty of it all, of the harmony into which we 
are set, that it signifies little to him upon what subject he 
preaches, and by what examples he illustrates his meaning ; 
there is a blessing upon his words, and sinelv the fragmerits 
which remain are worthy of the twelve baskets of the 
Apostles. 

It seemed to me one day last summer as if in truth Rus- 
kin's actual page was shining before me as I waited on the 
slope of Blackilown Moor in Surrey. It was the day of the 
Naval Review, and as I rested in a blackberry-bordered field 
I could see the tossing land-waves alive with summer and 
summer toil, the laborers patiently pacing ami repacing the 
furrows, the hay-carts unloading; other hedges again divid- 
ing harvest from harvest, labor from labor ; and in the far 
distance a dazzling plain, with gleams of^ white like tlu' 

'34 



breakers of the sea, and overhead a midsummer vaialt r>f 
])\uc, across which a hawk was dartinj^ in j^iorious serenity. 
One of Ruskin's books was lyin^ open on tlie grass, anrl 
the very page seemed to slide forth to fill the air; now anrl 
then a faint breeze would shake the leaves and the count- 
less points and blossoms upon the trees and hedges still in 
my Ruskin land round about; while from time to time could 
be heard the distant echo of the Portsmouth guns saluting 
tlie Queen as she passed among her shijjs. 

Xoi K.— '1 his note is froruHhe /'uU Mall Cnzctti- of March 28, 1887, 
and was compilcfl from information given I>y Mr. Allen, to show what 
the comparative sale of Mr. Ruskin's hooks had hcen for 1886: 

Sesame and LiiicH fHmall edition), 2122 ; I'VondcH AgreHtcn, 1273 ; Stone* of Venice 
(^large edition), 939; Unto tliio La»t, K74; KthicH of the fJuitt, 808; [''orn (jlavigera 
(vohimcs of), 730; Seven I.ampft of Architecture, 668; Modern Painter», Vol. tl. (ftmall 
edition), 652 ; Stones of Venice fsmall travellers' edition, in two vols.), each, 675 ; On 
the CJld Road, 597; King of the Golden River, 388. 

Of the books issuinf^ in parts, the followin^j fij^ures will he interesting: 

I'ra,-terita (20 parts issued), 63,386; The Art of England {^ parts issued), 1929; 
Road-side .SongK of Tuscany (lo parts issued), 1459; Proscrpjina, 921. 

The Kin^ of tlie (Joldun River, it may he interesting tfjadd, is largely 
h')Ught by the London School Hoard for prizes. Mr. Ruskin's Letter 
to Vouni^ Girls has also a large sale, 264 packets (containing 31C8 co]>ies 
ill all) having been sold during last year. 

With regard to tlic "Revised Series" of Mr. Ruskin's works, the 
following were the .sales during 1886 : 

.Sesame and f-ilies, 272 ; Crown of Wild Olive, 188 ; Queen of the Air, 108 ; Kagle's 
Nest, 104 ; Two Paths, 96 ; Time and Tide, 89 ; Munera Hul veris, 73 ; * Val d'Arno, 54 ; 
*Aratra Rentelice, 53 ; A Joy Forever, 51 ; *Ariadnc Florentina, ^d. 

This series, it should be stated, is a very expensive one, the ordinary 
volumes costing 13.?. each (unbound), the illustrated (marked above witii 
an asterisk), 22.f. ()ci. The uiiillustrated v<jlumes are, however, all in 
course of being issued in cheaj) form, similar to the small Sesame and 
Lilies, of which over 2fX)0 copies were sold last year. PrtpJerita is 
steadily increasing in popularity. Last year 3169 copies of each part 
were sold on an average. Mr. Allen is now printing for first edition 
S'xxj cojjies of each. 



ROBERT AND I-:LI/AP>HTII M,AI<'Ri:rT 
V>U()WN\N(j 



" / (/i> not A-//(n»', iJ//(/ iiiiiil' ti'/.s.v /><-()/'/i' thjii I (/() not kiuKC, 
u'biit vntiinis jit' iiis/>iri\i jini tchicb an- not, hut I lAi know of 
ihost' I hjvc' it'iid ui'itb air i/ussiijl hi'/on^iiis[ to tbc Etcnul 
Snut,:" 

rrol'aoo to llio " nibliollu'ia rastoniui," RrsKlN. 



I 



'^T^IIIC sons and dauji^hters of men and women eminent in 
X. their (generation are from circumstances fortunate in 
their opportunities. I'rom childhorul tliey know their par- 
ents' friends and contchiporaries, the remarkable men and 
wfjmen who are the makers of the af^e, quite naturally and 
without excitement. At the same time this facility may 
perhaps detract in some de^^ree from the undeniable f^la- 
inour of the Unknown, and, indeed, it is not til! much later 
in life that the time comes to appreciate. 

15 or (' f>r I) are great men; we know it i^ecause our fa- 
lliers have told us; Ijut the moment when we yir/ it for 
ourselves comes suddenly ;iiif| mysteriously. My own expe- 
rience certainly is this: the friends existed first; then, lf;ng 
afterwards, they became to me the notabiliiies, the interest- 
ing people as well, and these two impressions were oddly 
combined in my mir)d. When we were children living in 
J'aris, we used to look with a certain mingled terror and fas- 
cinatirm at various pages of grim heads drawn in black and 
red chalk, something in the manner of Fuseli. Masks and 
faces were depicted, crowding together with malevolent or 
agonized or terrific expressions. There were the suggestions 
of a hundrerl weird stories on the pages at which one gazed 
with creeping alarm. These pictures were all drawn by a 
kind ;ind most gentle neighbor of ours, whom we all often 
met and visited, and of whom we were not in the very least 
afraid. His name was Mr. Robert lirowning. He was the 
father of the poet, and he lived with his daughter in calm 

I 12'J 



and pleasant retreat in those Champs-Elysees to which so 
many people used to come at that time seeking well-earned 
repose from their labors by crossing- the Channel instead of 
the Styx. I don't know whether Mr. and Miss Browning 
always lived in Paris ; they are certainly among the people 
I can longest recall there. But one day I found mvself 
listening with some interest to a conversation which liad 
been going on for some time between my grandparents antl 
Miss Jirowning — a long matter-of-fact talk about houses, 
travellers, furnished apartments, sunshine, south aspects, 
etc., and on asking who were the travellers coming to 
inhabit the apartments, I was told that our Mr. Browning- 
had a son who lived abroad, and who was expected shortly 
with his wife from Italy, and that the rooms were to be en- 
gaged for them ; and I was also told that they were very 
gifted and celebrated people ; and I further remember that 
very afternoon being taken over various vacant houses and 
lodgings by my grandmother. Mrs. Browning was an in- 
valid, my grandmother told me, who could not possibly live 
without light and warmth. So that by the time the travel- 
lers had really arrived, and were definitively installed, we 
were all greatly excited ami interested in their whereabouts, 
and well convinced that wherever else the sun might or 
might not fall, it must shine upon ihcm. In this homely 
fashion the shell of the future — the foin- walls of a friend- 
ship — began to exist before the friends themselves walked 
into it. We were taken to call very soon after they arrived. 
Mr. Browning was not there, but Mrs. Browning received us 
in a low room with Napoleonic chairs and tables, and a 
wood-fue burning on the hearth. 

I don't think anv girl who had once experienced it could 
fail to respond to Mrs. lirowning's motherly advance. There 
was something more than kindness in it ; there was an im- 
plied interest, ecpiality, and understanding which is very 



(lirficult to (lcs(:ril)(! and impossible to for<;ct. This j^ener- 
ous humility of nature was also to the last one special at- 
tribute of Kobert Urowninj; himself, transhited l>y him into 
cheerful and vii^orous ^ood-vvill and ulter abscMiee of affec- 
tation, i'ut again and aj^ain one is struck by that form 
of greatness which consists in reaching the reality in all 
things, instead of keeping to the formalities and IIk; af- 
fectations of life, 'i'he free-and-easiness of the small is a 
very different thing from tliis. It may l)e as false in its way 
as formality itself, if it is founded on conditions vvlii( h do 
not and can never exist.*" 

To the writer's own particular taste there; never will be 
any more (lelightlul person than the simple minded woman 
of the Wfjrld, who has seen enough to know what its praise is 
all worth, who is sure enough of her own position to take it 
for grant(;d, who is interested in the person she is talking 
to, and unconscious of anything but a wish to give kindness 
and attention. 'I'his is the impression Mrs. ISrowning made 
upf)n mc; from tlu; lirst moment 1 ever saw Ix^r to the last. 
Alas! the moments were not so very many when we were 
together, i'erhaps all the more vivid is the recollection of 
the peaceful home, of the fireside where; the- logs arc; burn- 
ing while the lady of that kind hearth is established in her 
sofa corner, with her little boy curled up by her side, the 
door opening and shutting meanwhile to tin; c|uick .step of 
the master of the house, to the life of tiie world without as 
it came to find her in her cjuiet nf)ok. 'I'he hours seemed 
to my sister and to me warmer, more full of interest and 
peace, in her sitting-room than elsewhere. Whether at 
Florence, at Rome, at Paris, or in London once more, she 
.seemed to carry her own atmosphere always, something seri- 
ous, motherly, absolutely artless, and yet impassioned, noble, 
and sincere. I can recall the slight figure in its thin black 
dress, the writing apparatus by the sofa, the; liny inkstand, 



the quill-nibbed pen — the unpretentious implements of her 
magic. "She was a little woman; she liked little things," 
Mr. Browning used to say. Her miniature editions of the 
classics are still carefully preserved, with her name written 
in each in her delicate, sensitive handwriting, and ahvavs 
with her husband's name above her own, for she dedicated 
all her books to him; it was a fancy that she had. Nor 
must his presence in the home be forgotten any more than 
in the books — the spirited domination and inspired common- 
sense, which seemed to give a certain life to her vaguer vi- 
sions. Hut of these visions Mrs. Browning rarely spoke; she 
was too simple and practical to indulge in many apostrophes. 



II 



To all of us who have only known Mrs. Browning in her 
own home as a wife and a mother, it seems almost impossi- 
ble to realize the time before her home existed — when Mrs. 
Browning was not, and Elizabeth Barrett, dwelling apart, 
was weaving her spells like the Lady of Shalott, and sub- 
ject, like the lady herself, to the visions in her mirror. 

Mrs. Browning* was born in the County of Durham, on 
the 6th of March, 1S09. It was a golden year for poets, 
for it was also that of Tennyson's birth. She was the eldest 
daughter of Edward Moulton, and was christened by the 
names of Elizabeth Barrett. Not long after iier birth Mr. 
Moulton, succeeded to some property, and took the name 
of Barrett, so that in after-times, when Mrs. Browning signed 



* The passages relating to Mrs. Browning's life arc taken (by the iierniission of 
the proprietor and editor) from an article contributed by the present writer to the 
" Biographical Dictionary " published by Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. 

132 




ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 



herself at length as Elizabeth IJarrett Brownini;, it \v;is her 
own Christian name that she used without any further lit- 
erary assumptions. Her mother was Mary Graham, the 
daughter of a Mr. Graham, afterwards known as Mr. Graham 
Clark, of Northumberland. Soon after the child's birtli her 
parents brought her southward, to Hope End, near Ledbury, 
in Herefordshire, where Mr. Barrett possessed a considera- 
ble estate, and had built himself a country-house. The house 
is now pulled down, but it is described by Lady Carmichael, 
one of the family, as "a luxurious home standing in a lovely 
park, among trees and sloping hills all sprinkled with sheep;" 
and this same lady remembers the great hall, with the great 
organ in it, and more especially Elizabeth's room, a lofty 
chamber, with a stained-glass window casting lights across 
the floor, and little Elizabeth as she used to sit propped 
against the wall, with her hair falling all about her face. 
There were gardens round about the house leading to the 
park. Most of the children had their own plots to culti- 
vate, and Elizabeth was famed among them all for success 
with her white roses. She had a bower of her own all over- 
grown with them ; it is still blooming for the readers of the 
lost bower "as once beneath the sunshine." Another fa- 
vorite device with the child was that of a man of flowers, 
laid out in beds upon the lawn — a huge giant wrought of 
blossom. " Eyes of gentianella azure, staring, winking at 
the skies." 

Mr. Barrett was a rich man, and his daughter's life was 
that of a rich man's child, far removed from the stress and 
also from the variety and experience of humbler life ; but 
her eager spirit found adventure for itself. Her gift for 
learning was extraordinary. At eight years old little Eliza- 
beth had a tutor and could read Homer in the original, 
holding her book in one hand and nursing her doll on the 
other arm. She has said herself that in those days " the 

'35 



Greeks were her demi - gods ; she dreamed more of Aga- 
memnon than of Moses, her bhick pony."" At the same 
small age she began to try her childish powers. When she 
was about eleven or twelve, her great epic of the battle of 
Marathon was written in four books, and her proud father 
had it printed. "Papa was bent upon spoiling me," she 
writes. Her cousin remembers a certain ode the little girl 
recited to her father on his birthday ; as he listened, shading 
his eyes, the young cousin was wondering why the tears 
came falling along his cheek. It seems right to add on this 
same authority that their common grandmother, who used 
to stay at the house, did not approve of these readings and 
writings, and said she had far rather see Elizabeth's hem- 
ming more carefully finished otT than hear of all this Greek. 
Elizabeth was growing up meanwhile under happy influ- 
ences ; she had brothers and sisters in her home ; her life 
was not all study ; she had the best of company— that of 
happy children as well as of all natural things ; she loved 
her hills, her gardens, her woodland play-ground. As she 
grew older she used to drive a pony and go farther afield. 
There is a story still told of a little child, flying in terror along 
one of the steep Herefordshire lanes, perhaps frightened by 
a cow"s horn beyond the hedge, who was overtaken by a 
young girl, with a pale, spiritual face and a profusion of 
dark curls, driving a pony-carriage, and suddenly caught up 
into safety and driven rapidly away. But, alas ! it was very 
earlv in her life that Elizabeth's happy drives and rides were 
discontinued, and the sad apprenticeship to suffering began. 
Was it Moses, the black pony, who was so nearly the cause 
of her death ? One day, when she was about fifteen, the 
young girl, impatient to get out, tried to saddle her pony in 
a field alone, and fell with the saddle upon her, in some way 
injuring her spine so seriously that she lay for years upon 
her back. 

«36 



She was about twenty when her mother's last illness be- 
gan, and at the same time some money catastrophe, the re- 
sult of other people's misdeeds, overtook Mr. Barrett. He 
would not allow his wife to be troubled or to be told of this 
crisis in his affairs, and he compounded with his creditors 
at an enormous cost, materially diminishing his income for 
life, so as to put off any change in the ways at Hope End 
until change could trouble the sick lady no more. After 
her death, when Elizabeth was a little over twenty, they 
came away, leaving Hope End among the hills forever. 
"Beautiful, beautiful hills!" Miss Barrett wrote long after 
from her closed sick-room in London, " and yet not for the 
whole world's beauty would I stand among the sunshine 
and shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, 
like the taking back a broken flower to its stalk." 

The family spent two years at Sidmouth, and afterwards 
came to London, where Mr. Barrett first bought a house in 
Gloucester Place, and then removed to Wimpole Street. His 
daughter's continued delicacy and failure of health kept her 
for months at a time a prisoner to her room, but did not 
prevent her from living her own life of eager and beautiful 
aspiration. She was becoming known to the world. Her 
Prometheus, which was published when she was twenty-six 
years old, was reviewed in the Quarterly Review for 1840, 
and there Miss Barrett's name comes second among a list 
of the most accomplished women of those days, whose little 
tinkling guitars are scarcely audible now, while this one voice 
vibrates only more clearly as the echoes of her time die away. 

Her noble poem on "Cowper's Grave" was republished 
with the "Seraphim,"* by which (whatever her later opinion 
may have been) she seems to have set small count at the 

* In a surviving copy of this book, belonging to Mr. Dykes Campbell, there is an 
added stanza to the " Image of God " never yet printed, and also many corrections in 
her delicate handwriting. 



time, " all the remaining copies of the book being locked 
away in the wardrobe in her father's bedroom," " entombed 
as safely as CEdipus among the Olives." 

From Wimpole Street Miss Barrett went, an unwilling 
exile for her health's sake, to Torquay, where the tragedy 
occurred which, as she writes to Mr. Home, "gave a night- 
mare to her life forever," Her companion -brother had 
come to see her and to be with her and to be comforted by 
her for some trouble of his own, when he was accidentally 
drowned, under circumstances of suspense which added to 
the shock. All that year the sea beating upon the shore 
sounded to her as a dirge, she says in a letter to Miss Mit- 
ford. It was long before Miss Barrett's health was suffi- 
ciently restored to allow of her being brought home to 
Wimpole Street, where many years passed away in confine- 
ment to a sick-room, to which few besides members of her 
own family Avere admitted. Among these exceptions was 
her devoted Miss Mitford, who would " travel forty miles 
to see her for an hour." Besides Miss Mitford, Mrs. Jame- 
son also came, and, above all, Mr. Kenyon, the friend and 
dearest cousin, to whom Mrs. Browning afterwards dedi- 
cated Aurora Leigh. ]Mr. Kenyon had an almost fatherly 
affection for her, and from the first recognized his young 
relative's genius. He was a constant visitor and her link 
with the outside world, and he never failed to urge her to 
write, and to live out and beyond the walls of her chamber. 

Miss Barrett lay on her couch with her dog Flush at her 
feet, and Miss Mitford describes her reading every book, 
in almost every language, and giving herself heart and soul 
to poetry. She also occupied herself with prose, writing lit- 
erary articles for the AtJunivuni, and contributing to a mod- 
ern rendering of Chaucer, which was then being edited by 
her unknown friend, Mr. R. H. Home, from whose corre- 
spondence with her I have already quoted, and whose inter- 



est in literature and occupation with literary things must have 
brought wholesome distractions to the monotonies of her life. 
The early letters of Mrs. Browning to Mr. Home, written 
before her marriage, and published with her husband's sanc- 
tion after her death, are full of the suggestions of her de- 
lightful fancy. Take, for instance, " Sappho, who broke off 
a fragment of her soul for us to guess at." Of herself she 
says (apparently in answer to some questions), " My story 
amounts to the knife-grinders, with nothing at all for a 
catastrophe ! A bird in a cage would have as good a story ; 
most of my events and marly all my intense pleasures have 
passed in my thoughts'' But such a woman, though living 
so quietly and thus secluded from the world, could not have 
been altogether out of touch with its changing impressions. 
Here is an instance of her unconscious presence in the 
minds of others: "I remember all those sad circumstances 
connected with the last doings of poor Haydon." Mr, 
Browning writes to Professor Knight, in 1882 : " He never 
saw my wife, but interchanged letters with her occasionally. 
On visiting her, the day before the painter's death, I found 
her room occupied by a quantity of studies — sketches and 
portraits — which, together with paints, palettes, and brushes, 
he had chosen to send, in apprehension of an arrest or, at 
all events, an ' execution ' in his own house. The letter 
which apprised her of this step said, in excuse of it, ' they 
may have a right to my goods ; they can have none to my 
mere work tools and necessaries of existence,' or words to 
that effect. The next morning I read the account in the 
Times, and myself hastened to break the news at Wimpole 
Street, but had been anticipated. Every article was at once 
sent back, no doubt. I do not remember noticing Words- 
worth's portrait — it never belonged to my wife, certainly, at 
any time. She possessed an engraving of the head ; I sup- 
pose a gift from poor Haydon. . . ." 



Ill 



When Mrs. Orr's authoritative history of Robert Brown- 
ing appeared, the writer felt that it was but waste of time 
to attempt anything like a biographical record. Hers is 
but a personal record of impressions and remembrances. 
Others, with more knowledge of his early days, have de- 
scribed Robert Browning as a child, as a boy, and a very 
young man. How interesting, among other things, is the 
account of the little child among his animals and pets ; 
and of the tender mother taking so much pains to find the 
original editions of Shelley and of Keats, and giving them 
to her boy at a time when their works were scarcely to be 
bought!* Browning was a year younger than my own fa- 
ther, and was born at Camberwell, in May, 1812. He went 
to Italy when he was twenty years of age, and there he 
studied hard, laying in a noble treasury of facts and fancies 
to be dealt out in after-life, when the time comes to draw 
upon the past, upon that youth which age spends so liber- 
ally, and which is "the background of pale gold" upon 
which all our lives are painted. 

Browning's first published poem was " Pauline," coming 
out in 1833, the same year as the "Miller's Daughter" and 
the " Dream of Fair Women." And we are also told that 

* There is a little story in Mrs. Orr's book whicli Mr. Browning himself once told 
some of the children of our family : how, when he was a small boy at school, there was 
one solemn day in the week when all the little scholars' hairs were brushed and rubbed 
with oil, which was the fashion in those days, while their mistress chanted Watts's 
hymns to them, especially that one which begins " Anoint with heavenly grace." 

140 




ROBERT BROWNING 
From a copyrighted photograph by W. H. Grove. 174 Bromplon Road, London 



iJante Rossetti, then a very youn;^ man, ad/nired " i^auline" 
so much that he copied* the vvhoh,' poem out from the book 
in the lirilish Museum. 

In 1834 Robert lirowning went to Russia, and there wrote 
" J'orphyria's Lover," published by Mr. Fox in a Unitarian 
magazine, where the poem must have looked somewhat out 
of place. It was at Mr. Fox's house that Jirownin^ first 
met Macready. 

Notwithstanding many differences and consequent es- 
trangements, I have often heard Mr. iJrowning speak of the 
great actor with interest <and sympathy; the last time being 
when Recollections of Macready, a book by Lady Pollock, 
had just come out. She had sent Mr. Jirowning a copy, 
with which he was delighted. He said he had stopped at 
home all that winter's day reading it by the fire, and now 
that dinner-time was come he could quote page after page 
from memory. His memory was to the last most remark- 
able. 

'I'here is a touching passage in .Mrs. Orr's book describ- 
ing the meeting of drowning and Macready after their long 
years of estrangement. Both had seen their homes wrecked 
and desolate ; both had passed through deep waters. They 
met unexpectedly and grasped each other's hands again. 
"Oh! Macready," said Browning. And neither of them 
could speak another word. 

I have been fortunate for years past in being able to 
count upon the help of a recording friend and neighbor, to 
whom I sometimes go for the magic of a suggestive touch 
when together we conjure up things out of the past. 

I wrote to ask Lady Martin about the production of Mr. 
Browning's plays upon the stage, and she sent me the fol- 
lowing account of her recollections of " Strafford ;" nor can 

• The writer has in her posRCHsion a book in which her own father, somewhere 
about those same years, copied out Tennyson's " Day Dream " verse by verse. 

'43 



I do better now than insert her answer Iiere at length, for 
to cut out any word is to destroy tlie impression which it 
gives : 

".4 /»>■/'/ JO, iSi)!, riRIGHTON. 

" The' proiUuiion of Hrdwniiig's ' .StiaRonl,' whicli you ask inc al)Out, 
occurred so early in my career that auytliing I could say about it woukl 
be, I fear, of little use to you. I was so young then, and just a mere 
novice in my art, so that my first feeling, when I heard the play read, 
was one of wonder tliat such a weighty character as Lucy, Countess of 
(.'arlislc, sliouKl lie intrusted to my hands. I was told that Mr. Brown- 
ing had particularly wished uic to undtn'tako it. 1 naturally felt the 
coniplinient implied in the wish, but this only increased my sur[irise, 
which dill not diminish as I advanced in the slutly of the character. 

" Lady Carlisle, as drawn by Mr. Browning, a woman versed in all 
the political struggles and intrigues of the times, did not move me. The 
only interest she awoke in me was due to her silent love for Strafford 
and devotion to his cause ; and I wondeied why, depending so abso- 
lutely as he dill upon her sympathy, her intelligence, her complete self- 
abnegation, he should only ha\e, in the early part, a eonmion expression 
of gratitude to give her in return. 

"This made the treatment of Lucy's character, as you will readily 
see, all the more dillicult in the necessity it imposed upon me of letting 
her feeling be seen by the audience, without its being i^crceptible to 
Strallord. 

"Of course I did my best to carry out what 1 conceived was Mr. 
Browning's view ; and he, at all e\ ents, I had reason to know, was well 
satisfied with my eflbrts. 1 had met him at Mr. and Mrs. Macready's 
house previously, so that at the rehearsals we renewed mir acquaintance. 

"I suppose he was nervous, for I remember Mr. Macready read the 
play to us in the greenroom. And how finely he read I lie made the 
smallest part distinct and prominent. He was accused of under-reading 
his own part. But I do not think this was so. 

"At the rehearsals, when Mr. Browning was introduced to those 
ladies and gentlemen whom he did not know, his demeanor was so kind, 
considerate, and courteous, so grateful for the attention shown to his 
wishes, that he won directly the warm interest of all engaged in the 
play. So it was that although many doubtful forecasts were made in 
the greenroom as to the ultimate attraction of a play so entirely turn- 

144 



injj on politics, yet all were ik-termincil to do their very l)cst to insure 
its success. 

"In the piny L.ucy has only to meet Strafford, King Charles, and 
Ilenrictla. Il seemed to me that Mr. Macready's Strafford was a fine 
performance. The character fitted in with his restless, nervous, change- 
able, impetuous, and emphatic style. He looked the very man as we 
knew hi!n in Vandyck's famous picture. The royal personages were 
very feeijiy represented. I could not help feeling in the scenes with 
them that my earnestness was overdone, and tha'c I had no business to 
appear to dominate and sway and direct opinions wiiilc liicy stood 
nerveless by. 

"There were some fine moments in ilic j'lay. The last scene must 
have been very exciting hud loucliing. Lucy itelieves that by iicr means 
.Strafford's escape is certain ; but wiien tiie water-gates o|)cn, with the 
boat ready lo receive him, Pyin steps out of il ! . . . This effect was most 
powerful. 

" It was a dreadful moment. My heart seemed to cease to beat. I 
sank on my knees, burying my head in my bosom, and sto|)])ing my ears 
with my hands while the dcalh-bell lulled for Strafford. 

"I can remember nothing more than that I went home very sad; 
for although the play was considered a success, yet, somehow, even my 
small experience seemed to tell me it would not be a very long life, and 
that perhai)s kind Mr. Browning would think we had not done our best 
for him. 

" The play was mounted in all matters with great care. Modern 
critics seem to have little knowledge of the infinite pains bestowed in 
all respects before their day upon the representation of historical and 
Shakespearian //(/I'.f and noteworthy /co/i/f' in romance or history. 

" I can see my gown now in Lucy Percy, made from a Vandyck 
picture, and remember the thought bestowed even upon the /cim/ of fur 
with which the gown was trimmed. The same minute attention to 
accuracy of costume prevailed in all the characters produced. 'I'lie 
scenery was alike accurate, if not so full of small details as at present. 
The huniaii beings dominated all." 

• I need scarcely add that I have heard from others of Miss 
Helen Faucit's perfect rendering of the part of Lucy Car- 
lisle. Browning himself spoke of Miss Faucit's " ijlaying 
as an actress, and her perfect behavior as a woman." 

K 145 



IV 



T\Tv fricml, I'roi'rssor Kni;;lit, h;is kindly j^ivcn u\c \ca\c 
to t|iiii(c hoin SDiiu' ol his iiiliTt'Stinj.'; IctU'is limu Kolx-il 
r.iow iiiiiL;. ( )iu' must inlci cstiiiL; ircoid drsc rihrs the pdrl's 
own Insl :i(i|ii,iinl.iii<c uilli All. K(ii\iin. 'riic Idler is 
(l.ili'il |,niii.u\' the lolli, iSS|, hiil tin- i'\i'iils H'Litcd, ol 
com si', lo soMu- loi l\' V fill s ln'loi (• : 



"Willi irspcil lollic inldi ir.iU inn \(iu clc.iir aluuil Mr. l\rn\iiii, all 
lll.ll 1 ilii ' kimw 111 liilli lirllii 111. in ail\ In mU, ' |u'llia|is -is ilis ^liMl 
(.■niMJiu-s', lo luvM'll. SiiiiMilai l\', lilllc rc',|H-il ill:; his cai'lv lilr laiiu' lo 
iii\' know Icili'i'. Ill- was llir cousin ol Mi. liaiirll ; srroiid rousin, 
lliiicloic, ol niv wile, lo whom lie was r\ri (h-i-|il\' allailusj. I liisl 
mil liini .il a iliiinn ol Sci;,',iMnl rallouiil's, allci \\liuli In- ilicw his 
I'huir li\' mine ami im|uii(s| whclln-i ni\' l.ilhci liail Iuh-ii his old siliool- 
ffllow .111(1 liu'iul al I 111' .liiiiil , aiMin;.'_ llial, in .1 poem jiisl |iiiiilril, he 
liail lucn I'ommcmoial iiii; lluii \'\:\\ i;roiinil lii'Jils, aininl willi swuiil 
ami shii-hl, as .Vrhillrs ami I lis lor, some hall' rciiliirv lu'lorr. ( >ii Irll- 
ini; lliis lo u\\ lalliri al InraMasI, ncxl morniii;'., he al oiu'c, willi a prii- 
cil, skclrhiil nir llir hoy's h.imlsomc larc, slill <l isl ini'.u ish.il ih- 111 ihr 
I'Kli'ih' ;;fnl Ic man's I hail niaili- .ii-c|iiainl.imr willi. ,M 1 . K<ai\oii .11 
OIU'C rcnrw'isl his ow n ai'(|iiainl.im (■ with iii\' l.illu'i, ami lu-cimr mv last 
frii'lul ; lu'iu (• mv inlioilmlion lo Miss Haiirll. 

" lie was one ol ihc lu'sl ol Imniaii luiii!;s, willi a j't'iicral svinpaliiy 
for fMcllnici' ol f\.Mv kiml. II.- cniovisl Ihe liirmlship of W ohIs- 
woilli, of Soiillicv, ol' lamloi ; ami, 111 lalia il,i\s, was inlimalo willi 
inosl i'\ mv ox\ 11 (diilrmpoi .nil's ol fiiiinrmc. I In-lirvr lli.il he w .Is 
jioin in ihr W r-.l linlits, wlirmi' Ins |iio|uil\' was (lcii\(sl, as was lliat 
1)1' Mr. l?ai'li-ll, pi'isisti'iith slvlril a ' nuii h.inl ' hy hio^raplic'is w lio 
will not taUi' tlu- p.niiis to ilo more llian io|i\' ihc hlumlcrs of their foie- 
iiiiineis in the liusiiirss of nrtiele-inoii:;erv. lie was twu'e inarriiil, iiiii 



left no family. I should suggest Mr. Scliarf (of the National Portrait 
Gallery) as a far more qutilified informant on all such matters ; my own 
concern having mainly been with his exceeding goodness to me and 
mine." 



Mr. Kenyon has sometimes dined with my father. I can 
remember him, and also a smooth, fair printed book of his 
poems, with broad margins, and some odd suggestive look 
of its author. For many years he lived in Regent's Park. 
After his death, Mrs, Bayne, a kind and hospitable cousin 
of my father's, dwelt in the house with her daughter, who 
still resides there. My father used to say that the dining- 
room was the prettiest room in all London. It has wide 
green windows looking across the park, and there were grace- 
ful pillars to support the bay. As I sat at the round-table I 
used to hear of Mr. Kenyon's gatherings and the friends who 
met in the pretty sunny room where his picture still hangs, 
and where so many of his guests returned at the summons of 
their kind hostess. I remember my father sitting there and 
talking of the past, with affectionate words of remembrance, 
and Mr. Browning used to be often present with another of 
Mrs. Bayne's old friends, Dr. Connop Thirlwall; and as one 
thinks of it all, one feels, perhaps, that to remember old 
friends in peaceful festive hours is better for our souls than 
all the memento niori that ever were set up by perverse mor- 
tals struggling in vain against the repeated benedictions of 
Providence. 

As wc all know, it was Mr. Kenyon who first introduced 
Robert Browning to his future wife ; and the story, as 
told by Mrs. Orr, is most romantic. The poet was about 
thirty-two years of age at this time, in the fulness of his 
powers. She was supposed to be a confirmed invalid, con- 
fined to her own room and to her couch, seeing no one, 
living her own spiritual life indeed, but looking for none 

147 



other, when her cousin first brought Mr. Browning to the 
house. Miss Barrett's reputation was well established by 
this time. " Lady Geraldine's Courtship" was already pub- 
lished, in which the author had written of Browning, among 
other poets, as of "some pomegranate, which, if cut deep 
down tlie middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a 
veined humanity;" and one can well believe that this present 
meeting must have been but a phase in an old and long-exist- 
ing sympathy between kindred spirits. Very soon afterwards 
the two became engaged, and they were married at Mary-le- 
Bone* Parish Church in the autumn of the year 1846. 

Who does not know the story of this marriage of true 
souls ? Has not Mrs. Browning herself spoken of it in 
words indelible and never to be quoted without sympathy 
by all women ; while he from his own fireside has struck 
chord after chord of manly feeling than which this life con- 
tains nothing deeper or more true. 

The Sonnets from the Portuguese were written by Eliza- 
beth Barrett to Mr. Browning before her marriage, although 
she never even showed them to him till some years after 
they were man and wife. They were sonnets such as no 
Portuguese ever wrote before, or ever will write again. 
There is a quality in them which is beyond words, that 
echo which belongs to the highest human expression of 
feeling. But such a love to such a woman comes with its 
own Testament. 

Some years before her marriage the doctors had positively 
declared that Miss Barrett's life depended upon her leaving 
England for the winter, and immediately after their marriage 
Mr. Browning took his wife abroad. 

Mrs. Jameson was at Paris when Mr. and Mrs. Browning 
arrived there. There is an interesting account of the meet- 

* See Biographical Dictionary. ■* 



ing, and of their all journeying together southward l)y Avig- 
non and Vaucluse.* Can this be the life-long invalid of 
whom we read, perching out-of-doors upon a rock, among 
the shallow, curling waters of a .stream ? They come to a 
rest at Pisa, whence Mrs. Browning writes to her old friend, 
Mr. Home, to tell him of her marriage, adding that Mrs. 
Jameson calls her, notwithstanding all the emotion and fa- 
tigue of the last six weeks, rather "transformed" than im- 
proved. P>om Pisa the new-married pair went to Florence, 
where they finally settled, and where their boy was born in 
1849. 

Poets are painters in words, and the color and the atmos- 
phere of the country to which they belong seem to be re- 
peated almost unconsciously in their work and its setting. 
Mrs. Browning was an Englishwoman ; though she lived in 
Italy, though she died in Florence, though she loved the 
land of her adoption, yet she never, for all that, ceased to 
breathe her native air, as she sat by the Casa Guidi windows ; 
and though Italian sunshine dazzled her dark eyes, and 
Italian voices echoed in the street, though her very ink was 
mixed with the waters of the Arno, she still wrote of Here- 
fordshire lakes and hills, of the green land where "jocund 
childhood" played "dimpled close with hills and valley, 
dappled very close with shade." . . . Now that the writer 
has seen the first home and the last home of that kind friend 
of her girlhood, it seems to her as if she could better listen 
to that poet's song growing sweeter, as all true music does, 
with years. 

We had been spending an autumn month in Mrs. Brown- 
ing's country when we drove to visit the scene of her early 
youth, and it seemed to me as if an echo of her melody was 
still vibrating from hedge-row to hedge-row, even though the 

" Life 0/ Mrs. Jameson, by Mrs. Macpherson, 
"49 



birds were silent, and thougli smnnier anil singing-time were 
over, ^\'e drove along, my little son and 1. towards Hope 
End, by a road descending gradually from the range of the 
Malvern Hills into the valley — it ran across commons 
sprinkled w^ith geese and with lively donkeys, and skirted 
by the cottages still alight with sunflowers and nasturtium 
beds, for they were sheltered from the cold wind bv the 
range of purple hills " looming a-row ;" then we dipped into 
lanes between high banks heaped with ferns and leaves of 
every shade of burnisiied gold and brown, fenced up by the 
twisting roots of the chestnuts and oak-trees ; and all along 
the way, as our old white horse jogged steadily on, we could 
see the briers and the blackberry sprays travelling too, ad- 
vancing from tree to tree and from hedge to hedge. Hashing 
their long flaming brands and warning tokens of winter's 
approaching armies. The wind was cold and in the north, 
the sky overhead was broken and stormy. Sometimes we 
dived into sudden glooms among rocks overhung with ivy 
and thick brushwood ; then we came out into the open 
again, and caught sight of vast skies dashed with strange 
lights, a wonderful cloud-capped country up above, where 
the storm-clouds reared their vast piles out of sapphire 
depths — 

... " n boundless ilepth 
Far sinking into splendor without end." 

Our adventures were not along the road, but chielly over- 
head. My boy amused himself by counting the broken 
rainbows and the hail-storms falling in the distance; and 
then at last, just as we were getting cold and tired, we 
turned into the lodge gates of Hope End. 

I don't know how the park strikes other people ; to me, 
who paid this one short visit, it seemed a sort of enchanted 
garden revealed for an hour, and I almost expected that it 

150 










-S??^^--^ 



MKS. IlKOWNINC, S TdMH AT !■ I.l lUKNllt 



would tlicn vanish away.* Kvcrythin<j; was wild, al)rii|)t, and 
yet suddenly harmonious. We passed an unsuspected lake 
covered with water-lilies. A flock of slu!e|) at full <:^allop 
plunged across the road ; then came ponies, with Ion;; manes 
and round, wondering eyes, trotting after us. Sometimes in 
the Alps one has met such herds, wild creatures, sympathet- 
ic, nut yet afraid ! Iwiially we caught sight of the river, 



* " Merc's tlic f^.irdcii she wiilkcil .icross . , . 
I)()Wii tliis side of the Ki^'ivel walk 
She went while her robe's edge brushed the box : 
And here she paused iti her gracious talk 
To point me a moth on tlie milk-white llox. 
Roses ranged in valiant row 
I will never think she passed you by!". . . 

(ianii'n Juimu's, A'. 
'S' 



where a couple of waterfowl were flying into the sedges. 
But where was the wild swan's nest, and why was not tiie 
great god Pan there blowing upon his reed ? It all seemed 
so natural and so vivid that I should not have been startled 
to see him sitting quietly by the side of the river. 



The onlv memoranda I over made of Mrs. I'rowning's 
talk was when I was quite a young girl keeping a diary, and 
I heard her saying that Tennyson's Maud was "splendid ;" 
and " that without illness she saw no reason why the mind 
should ever fail." The visitor to whom she expressed tiiis 
opinion seems to have come away with me complaining that 
the conversation had been too matter-of-fact, too much to 
the point ; nothing romantic, nothing poetic, such as one 
might expect from a poet ! Another person also present 
had answered that was just the reason of Mrs. Browning's 
power — she kept her poetry for her poetry, and didn't scat- 
ter it about in conversation where it was not wanted ; and 
then follows a girlish note in the old diary : " I think Mrs. 
Browning is the greatest woman I ever saw in all my life. 
She is very small, she is brown, with dark eyes and dead 
brown hair; she has white teeth, and a low. curious voice; 
she has a manner full of charm and kindness ; she rarely 
laughs, but is always cheerful and smiling ; her eyes are very 
bright. Her husband is not unlike her. He is short ; ho is 
dark, with a frank, open countenance, long hair, streaked 
with gray; he opens his mouth wide when he speaks; he 
has white tooth ;"" and there the diary wanders off. 

When I first remember Mr. Browning he was a compara- 



lively young man — though, for the matter of that, he was 
always young, as his father had been before him —and he 
was also happy in this, that the length of his Hfe can best be 
measured by his work. In those days I had not read one 
single word of his poetry, but somehow one realized that it 
was there. Almost the first time I ever really recall Mr. 
Browning, he and my father and Mrs. Browning* were dis- 
cussing spiritualism in a very human and material fashion, 
each holding to their own point of view, and my sister and 
I sat by listening and silent. My father was always im- 
mensely interested by the stories told of Spiritualism and 
table-turning, though he certainly scarcely believed half 
of them. Mrs. Browning believed, and Mr. Browning was 
always irritated beyond patience by the subject. I can re- 
member her voice, a sort of faint minor chord, as she, lisp- 
ing the " r " a little, uttered her remonstrating " Robert I" 
and his loud, dominant barytone sweeping away every pos- 
sible plea she and my father could make ; and then came 
my father's deliberate notes, which seemed to fall a little 
sadly — his voice always sounded a little sad — upon the ris- 
ing waves of the discussion. I think this must have been 
just before we all went to Rome — it was in the morning, 
in some foreign city. I can see Mr. and Mrs. Browning, 
with their faces turned towards the window, and my fa- 
ther with his back to it, and all of us assembled in a little 
high-up room. Mr. Browning was dressed in a brown rough 
suit, and his hair was black hair then, and she, as far as I 
can remember, was, as usual, in soft-falling flounces of black 
silk, and with her heavy curls drooping, and a thin gold 
chain hanging round her neck. 

In the winter of 1853-54 we lived in Rome, in the Via della 
Croce, and the Brownings lived in the Bocca di Leone, hard 

* An ambiguous extract in Mrs. Orr's Life of Brcniminf; has only recalled my ov/n 
most vivid impression of the happy relations between m-j father and Mrs. Browning. 

'S3 



by. The evenings our father duied away from home our old 
donna (so I think cooks used to be called) would conduct 
us to our tranquil dissipations, through the dark streets, past 
the swinging lamps, up and down the black stone staircases; 
and very frequently we spent an evening with Mrs. Brown- 
ing in her quiet room, while Mr. Browning was out visiting 
some of the many friends who were assembled in Rome 
that year. At ten o'clock came our father's servant to fetch 
us back, with the huge key of our own somewhat imposing 
palazzo. It was a happy and an eventful time, all the more 
eventful and happy to us for the presence of the two kind 
ladies, Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Sartoris, who befriended us. 
I can also remember one special evening at Mrs. Sartoris's, 
when a certain number of people were sitting just before 
dinner-time in one of those lofty Roman drawing-rooms, 
which become so delightful when tliey are inhabited by Eng- 
lish people — which look so chill and formal in their natural 
condition. This saloon was on the first floor, with great 
windows at the farther end. It was all full of a certain 
mingled atmosphere, of fiowers and light and comfort and 
color. It was in contrast but not out of harmony with Mrs. 
Browning's quiet room — in both places existed the individu- 
ality which real home-makers know how to give to their 
homes. Here swinging lamps were lighted up, beautiful 
things hung on the wall, the music came and went as it listed, 
a great piano was drawn out and open, the tables were piled 
with books and flowers. Mrs. Sartoris, the lady of the shrine, 
dressed in some fllowing, pearly satin tea-gown, was sitting by 
a round-table reading to some other women who had come 
to see her. She was reading from a book of Mr. Brown- 
ing's poems which had lately appeared ; and as she read in 
her wonderful muse -like way she paused, she reread the 
words, and she emphasized the lines, then stopped short, 
the others exclaiming, half laughing, half protesting. ... It 

'54 



was a lively, excitable party, outstayin;^ llie usual hour of a 
visit; questioning, puzzling, and discursive — a J}rowning 
society of the past — into the midst of which a door opens 
(and it is this fact which recalls it to my mind;, and Mr. 
P>rovvning himself walks in, and the burst of voices is sud- 
denly reduced to one single voice, that of the hostess, call- 
ing him to her side, and asking him to defijie his meaning, 
liut he evaded the question, began to talk of something else 
— he never much cared to talk of his own poetry — and the 
drowning society dispersed. 

Mrs. Sartoris used tftlike to speak of a certain luncheon 
to which Mr. and Mrs. drowning once invited them when 
they were all staying in some country place in Italy, and 
which, so she always said, was one of the most delightful 
entertainments she could remember in all her life. One 
wonders whether the guests or the hosts contributed most. 
Each one has been happy and talked his or her best, and 
when the .Sartorises got up reluctantly to go, saying, " How 
delightful it has been," Mr. I^rowning cried, " Come back 
to sup with us, do;" and Mrs. Browning exclaimed, "Oh, 
Robert, how can you ask them ! There is no supper, noth- 
ing but the remains of the pie." And then, cries Robert 
Lrowning, "Well, come back and finish the pie." 

The Pall Mall Gazette of April 9, 1891, contains an 
amusing account of a journey from London to Paris taken 
forty years ago by Mr. and .Mrs. J3rowning. The compan- 
ion they carried with them writes of the expedition, dating 
from Chelsea, September 4, 1851 : 

"The day before yesterday, near midnight, I returned from a very 
short and very insignificant excursion to Paris, which, after a month at 
Malvern water-cure and then a ten days at Scotsbrig, concludes my 
travels for this year. Miserable puddle and tumult all my travels are ; 
of no use to me except to bring agitation, sleeplessness, sorrow, and dis- 
tress. Better not to travel at all unless when I am bound to do it. But 

15s 



this tour to Paris was a promised one. I had engaged to meet the Ash- 
burtons (Lord and Lady) there, on their return from Switzerland and 
Hamburg, before either party left London. The time at last suited ; 
all was ready except will on my part ; so, after hesitation and painful 
indecision enough, I did resolve, packed my baggage again, and did the 
little tour I stood engaged for." 

The chronicle begins on Monday, September 21st, when 
" Brother John" and Carlyle go to Chorley to consult about 
passports, routes, and conditions. . . . 

"At Chapman's shop I learned that Robert Browning (poet) and his 
wife were just about setting out for Paris. I walked to their place ; 
had, during that day and the following, consultations with these fellow- 
pilgrims, and decided to go with them ;•/<? Dieppe on Tiiursday. . . . 

" Up, accordingly, on Thursday morning, in unutterable flurry and tu- 
mult — phenomena on the Thames all dream-like, one spectralism chasing 
another — to the station in good time ; found the Brownings just arriv- 
ing, which seemed a good omen. Browning with wife and child and 
maid, then an empty seat for cloaks and baskets ; lastly, at the opposite 
end from me, a hard-faced, honest Englishman or Scotchman all in gray 
with a gray cap, who looked rather ostrich-like, but proved very harm- 
less and quiet — this was the loading of our carriage ; and so away we 
went. Browning talking very loud and with vivacity, I silent rather, 
tending towards many thouglus. . . . 

" Our friends, especially our French friends, were full of bustle, full 
of noise, at starting ; but so soon as we had cleared the little channel of 
Newhaven, and got iivto the sea or British Channel, all this abated, 
sank into the general sordid torpor of sea-sickness, with its miserable 
noises — ' houhah, hoh !' — and hardly any other, amid the rattling of the 
wind and sea. A sorry phasis of humanity! Browning was sick — lay 
in one of the bench tents horizontal, his wife below. I was not abso- 
lutely sick, but had to be quite quiet and without comfort, save in one 
cigar, for seven or eight hours of blustering, spraying, and occasional 
rain." 

And so with mention of prostration into doleful silence, 
of evanition into utter darkness, of the poor Frenchman who 
was so lively at starting, the story continues :, 

'S6 



"At l)ieppe, wliilc tlie others were in llie Imtel having some very 
bad cold tea and colder coftee, Browning was passing our luggage, 
brought it all in safe about half-past ten o'clock, and we could address 
ourselves to repose. So ' to bed in my upper room, bemoaned by the sea 
and small incidental noises of the harbor. . . . Next morning Browning, 
as before, did everything. I sat out-of-doors on some logs at my ease, 
and smoked, looking at the population and their ways. Browning 
fought for us, and we — that is, the woman, the child, and I — had only 
to wait and be silent.' ... At Paris the travellers came into a ' crowding, 
jingling, vociferous tumult, in which the brave Browning fought for us, 
leaving me to sit beside the woman.' " 

Mr. Browning once ^old us a little anecdote of the Car- 
lyles at tea in Cheyne Row, and of Mrs. Carlyle pouring 
out the tea, while a brass kettle was boiling on the hob, and 
Mr. Browning, presently seeing that the kettle was needed 
and that Carlyle was not disposed to move, rose from his 
own chair, and tilled the teapot for his hostess, and then 
stood by her tea-table still talking and absently holding the 
smoking kettle in his hand. 

"Can't you put it down .^" said Mrs. Carlyle, suddenly; 
and Mr. Browning, confused and somewhat absent, imme- 
diately popped the kettle down upon the carpet, which was 
a new one. 

Mrs. Carlyle exclaimed in horror — I have no doubt she 
was half-laughing — " See how fine he has grown ! He does 
not any longer know what to do with the kettle." 

And, sure enough, when Mr. Browning penitently took it 
up again, a brown oval mark was to be seen clearly stamped 
and burned upon tlie new carpet. " You can imagine what 
I felt," said Mr. Browning. " Carlyle came to my rescue. 
' Ye should have been more explicit,' said he to his wife." 

'57 



VI 



When my father wont fov the second tune to America, 
in 1856, my sister and 1 remained behind, and for a couple 
of davs we stayed on in our home before goin^■ to Taris. 
Those days of parting are always sad ones, and we were 
dismally moping about the house and preparing for our own 
journev when we were immensely cheered by a visitor. It 
was Mr. Ihowning, who came in to see us. ami wlu) brought 
us an affectionate little note from his wife. We were to 
go and spend the evening with them, tiie kind jteople 
said. Thev had Mr. Kenvon's brougham at their disposal, 
anil it would come and fetch us and take us back at night, 
and so that tirst sad evening passed far more hapjiilv 
than we could ever have imagined possible. 1 remember 
feeling, as young people do. utterly, hopelessly miserable, 
ar.d then suddenlv very cheerful every now and then. I 
believe mv father had planned it all with them before he 
went away. 

This was in the autumn of 1S56, and Aurora Ltig/i was 
published in 1S57. It was on the occasion of this journey 
home to England that the MS. of the poem was lost in a 
box at Marseilles. 

In this same box were also carefully put away certain \'el- 
vet suits and lace collars, in which the little son was to 
make his appearance among his English relatives. W'iio 
shall blame Mrs. Browning if her taste in boy's costume 
was somewhat too fanciful and poetic for the clays in which 
she lived? At any rate, her chief concern was not for her 




MR. MILSAND 
From a copyrighted photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron 



MSS., but for the loss of her little boy's wardrobe, which 
had been devised with so much motherly pride. 

Happily for the world at large, one of Mrs. Browning's 
brothers chanced to pass through Marseilles, and the box was 
discovered by him stowed away in a cellar at the customs. 

We must have met again in Paris later in this same year. 
The Brownings had an apartment near the ^lond-Point, and 
we were living close by with our grandparents during my 
father's absence. We used frequently to go and see them, 
only to find again the same warm and tranquil atmosphere 
that we used to breathe at Rome — the sofa drawn out, the 
tiny lady in the corner, the sun dazzling in at the window. 
On one occasion Mr. Hamilton Aide was paying a visit. He 
had been talking about books, and, half laughing, he turned 
to a young woman who had just come in, and asked her 
when her forthcoming work would be ready. Young persons 
are ashamed, and very properly so, of their early failures, of 
their pattes de mouches and wild attempts at authorship, and 
this one was no exception to the common law, and answered 
" Never," somewhat too emphatically. And then it was that 
Mr. Browning spoke one of those chance sayings which make 
headings to the chapters of one's life. " All in good time," 
he said, and he went on to ask us all if we remembered the 
epitaph on the Roman lady who sat at home, who spun 
wool. "You must spin your wool some day," he said, 
kindly, to the would-be authoress ; " every woman has wool 
to spin of some sort or another ; isn't it so.'" he asked, and 
he turned to his wife. 

I went home feeling quite impressed by the little speech, 
it had been so gravely and kindly made. My blurred pages 
looked altogether different somehow. It was spinning wool 
— it was not wasting one's time, one's temper — it was some- 
thing more than spoiling paper and pens. And this much 
I may perhaps add for the comfort of the future race of 

L l6l 



authoresses who are now twisting the cocoons from which 
the fluttering butterflies and Psyches yet to be will emerge 
some day upon their wings : never has anything given more 
trouble or seemed more painfully hopeless than those early 
incoherent pages, so full of meaning to one's self, so abso- 
lutely idiotic in expression. In later life the words come 
easily, only too readily; but then it is the meaning which 
lags behind. 

It was in that same apartment that I remember hearing 
Mr. Browning say (across all these long years): "It may 
seem to you strange that such a thing as poetry should be 
written with regularity at the same hour in every day. But, 
nevertheless, I do assure you it is a fact that my wife and I 
sit down every morning after breakfast to our separate work ; 
she writes in the drawing-room and I write in here," he said, 
opening a door into a little back empty room with a window 
over a court. And then he added, " I never read a word of 
hers until I see it all finished and ready for publication." 

Among the people that belong to these old Paris days, 
there is one friend of very early date v/hom we used to meet 
from time to time with Mr, and Miss Browning at the house 
of Mrs. Corkran and elsewhere ; this was Mr, Milsand, a 
man to whom every one turned with instinctive trust and 
sympathy, a slight body, a great and generous nature. Mr. 
Browning has described him in " Red Cotton Nightcap 
Country " — " a man of men " he calls him : 

"Talk to him for five minutes, 
Nonsense, sense, no matter what . . . 
There he stands, reads an English newspaper. 
Stock still, and now again upon the move 
Paces the beach, to taste the spring like you 
(Since both are human beings in God's eyes) ; 
That man will read you rightly head to foot." 
162 



A little further on follows a touching, outspoken expres- 
sion of true feeling : 

" He knows more and loves better than the world 
That never heard his name and never may . . . 
What hinders that my heart relieve itself : 
' O friend ! who makest warm my wintry world, 
And wise my heaven, if there we consort too.'" 

To Mr. Milsand, Browning has dedicated one of the later 
editions of " Sordello " and others of his poems. By the 
kindness of Madame Milsand I am able to give some pas- 
sages of Mr. Browning's correspondence with his friend. 
She has sent me the letters from her home at Dijon, and 
with the letters comes a little humorous sketch by the poet, 
of which a fac-simile is given here : 

" Florence, February 24, '58. 
" It is far too many weeks now, my dear Milsand, since we got your 
letter — and certainly it has never been out of sight any more than out 
of mind, for I put it over tho fireplace where we both sit these long win- 
ter evenings, and often, indeed, a glance at it has brought you beside 
us again, as on those pleasant Paris evenings. We P/nglish have a su- 
perstition that when people talk of us our ears burn — have yours 
caused you any serious inconvenience that way ? You know we three 
have long since passed the stage in friendship when assurances are 
necessary to any one of us. For us two here, we gained nothing by 
our sojourn in Paris like the knowledge and love of you, and yet Paris 
gave us many valuable things. One day, in all probability, we shall 
come together again, and meantime the news of you, though never so 
slight, will be a delight to us, yet your letter has been all this time un- 
answered ; but one reason was that only in the last day or two have I 
been able to get the review with your article in ; it is here on the table 
at last. In what is it obscure? Strong, condensed, and direct it is, 
and no doubt the common readers of easy writing feel oppressed by 
twenty pages of such masculine stuff. . . . My wife will write a few lines 
about ourselves ; she is suffering a little from the cold which has come 
late, nor very severely either, but enough to influence her more than 

163 



I could wish. We live wholly alone here ; I have not left the house 
one evening since our return. I am writing — a first step towards pop- 
ularity for me — lyrics with more music and painting than before, so as 
to get people to hear and see . . . something to follow if I can com- 
pass it. . . . 

"I have a new acquaintance here, much to my taste — Tennyson's 
eldest brother, who has long been settled here, with many of his brother's 
qualities : a very earnest, simple, and truthful man, with many admirable 
talents and acquirements, the whole sicklied o'er by an inordinate dose of 
our English disease, shyness ; he s?es next to no company, but conies 
here, and we walk together. ... I knew too little of Mr. Darley.* Will 
he keep the slender memory of me he may have, and do you, dear Mil- 
sand, ever know me for yours affectionately, R. B." 

In this same letter there is a paragraph which runs as 
follows : 

" Helen Faucit is going to produce an old play of mine, never acted, 
at the Haymarket, " Colombe's Birthday;" look out for it in April, keep- 
ing in mind the proverbial uncertainty of things theatrical. My main 
hope of its success lies in its being wholly an actor's and manager's 
speculation, not the writer's." 



VII 



It was in Florence Mrs. Browning wrote Casa Guidi Win- 
dows,\ containing the wonderful description of the proces- 
sion passing by, and that noble apostrophe to freedom be- 
ginning, " O ! magi from East and from the West." Aurora 
Leigh was also written here, which the author herself calls 
" the most mature of her works," the one into which her 

* The writer has left the little message to Mr. Darley, which commemorates anoth- 
er very early recollection : that of a gentle, handsome painter, whom she as a child re- 
members. His paintings made no particular impression upon us all, but his kind 
tranquillity of manner and courteous ways are not to be forgotten. 

t See Biograpliical Dictionary. ., 

164 



highest convictions have entered. The poem is full of 
beauty from the first page to the last, and beats time to a 
noble human heart. The opening scenes in Italy; the im- 
pression of light, of silence ; the beautiful Italian mother, 
the austere father, with his open books; the death of tiie 
mother, who lies laid out for burial in her red silk dress ; 
the epitaph " weep for an infant too young" to weep much, 
when Death removed this mother;" Aurora's journey to 
her father's old home ; her lonely terror of England ; her 
slow yielding to its silent beauty; her friendship with her 
cousin, Romney Leigh ; their saddening, widening knowl- 
edge of the burden and sorrow of life, and the way this 
knowledge influences both their fates — all is described with 
that irresistible fervor which is the translation of the es- 
sence of things into words. 

Mrs. Browning was a great writer; but I think she was 
even more a wife and a mother than a writer, and any ac- 
count of her would be incomplete which did not put these 
facts first and foremost in her history. 

The author of Aurora Leigh once added a characteristic 
page to one of her husband's letters to Leigh Hunt. She has 
been telling him of her little boy's illness. "You are aware 
that of that child I am more proud than twenty Auroras, 
even after Leigh Hunt has praised them. When he was 
ill he said to me, ' You pet, don't be unhappy about me; 
think it's only a boy in the street, and be a little sorry, but 
not unhappy.' Who could not be unhappy, I wonder? . . . 
I never saw your book called llie Religion of the Heart. I 
receive more dogmas, perhaps (my ' perhaps ' being in the 
dark, rather), than you do." 

She says in conclusion, " Churches do all of them, as at 
present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true 
Christianity in its proximate development — I, at least, can- 
not help believing them so." 

i6s 



She seemed, even in her life, something of a spirit, as her 
friend has said, and her view of life's sorrow and shame, of 
its beauty and eternal hope, is not unlike that which one 
might imagine a spirit's to be. She died at Florence in 
iS6i. It is impossible to read without emotion the account 
of her last hours — given in jRobcrt Broicnings Life — of her 
tender, nay, playful courage and sweetness, of his passion 
of grief. 

A tablet has been placed on Casa Guidi. voted by the 
municipality of Florence, and written by Tommaseo : 

■■ Here wrote ami died Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose woman's 
heart combined the wisdom of a wise man with the genius of a poet, and 
whose poems form a golden ring which joins Italy to England. The 
town of Florence, ever grateful to her, has placed this epitaph to her 
memory." 

There was a woman living in Florence, an old friend — 
clever, warm-hearted ^^.iss Isa Blagden, herself a writer — 
who went to Mr. Browning and his little boy in their terrible 
desolation, and who did what little a friend could do to 
help them. Day after day, and for two or three nights, she 
watched by the stricken pair until she was relieved ; then the 
father and the little son came back to England. They set- 
tled near Miss Barrett, ]\Irs. Browning's sister, who was liv- 
ing in Delamere Terrace, and upon her own father's death 
Miss Browning came to be friend, comforter, home-maker, 
for her brother. 

Tcan remember walking with my father under the trees 
of Kensington Gardens, when we met Mr. Browning just 
after his return to England. He was coming towards us 
along the broad walk in his blackness through the sunshine. 
We were then living in Palace Green, close by, and he came 
to see us very soon after. But he was in a jarred and 
troubled state, and not himself as yet, although I remember 



his speaking of the liouse he had just taken for himself and 
his boy. Tiiis was only a short time before my father's 
death. In 1864 my sister and I left our home and went 
abroad, nor did we all meet again for a long time. 

It was a mere chance, so Mr. Browning once said, whether 
he should live in this London house that he had taken, and 
join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be 
seen no more; but for great poets, as for small ones, events 
shape themselves by degrees, and after the first hard years 
of his return, a new and gentler day began to dawn for him. 
Miss Browning came to them, new interests arose, acquaint- 
ances ripened to friends (this blessed human fruit takes 
time to mature), his work and his influence spread. 

He published some of his finest work about this time. 
Dramatis Personce, a great part of which had been written 
before, came out in 1864; then followed the Ring and the 
Bool;, published by his good friend, and ours, Mr. George 
Murray Smith, and Balaustion, that exquisite poem, in 1871. 
Recognition, popularity, honorary degrees, all the tokens of 
appreciation, which should have come sooner, now began 
to crowd in upon "our great commoner," as some one 
called Mr. Browning when Lord Tennyson accepted his 
peerage — Lord Rectorships and P'ellowships and dignities 
of every sort came in due course. He went his own way 
through it all, cordially accepted the recognition, but chiefly 
avoided the dignities, and kept his two lives distinct. He 
had his public life and his own private life, with its natural 
interests and outcoming friendships, and constant alternate 
pulse of work and play. 

lirowning has been described as looking something like 
a hale naval officer; but in later life, when his hair tuined 
snowy white, he seemed to me more like some sage of by- 
gone ages. There was a statue in the Capitol of Rome to 

which Mrs, Sartoris always likened him. I cannot imagine 

167 



that any dnipod and fiUotod sago could ever liavo boon so 
deliglitful a companion, so racy, so unsoltishlv intcrestod in 
the events of the hour as he. " He was not onlv roadv for 
talk, but fond of it." said the writer of an atluiirable article 
in the Sf<rr/JiirJ.^ " lie was absolutely unatYected in his 
choice of topics: anything but the cant of literary circles 
pleased him. If only we know a tithe of what he knew. 
and of what, unluckily, he gives us credit for knowing, many 
a hint that serves only to obscure the sense would be clear 
enough." 

Among Browning's many gifts, that of delightful story- 
telling is certainly one which should not be passed over. 
His memory was very remarkable for certain things ; gen- 
eral facts, odds and ends of rhyme and doggerel, bits of 
recondite knowledge came back to him spontaneously and 
with vivacity. This is all to be noticed in his books, which 
treat of so many quaint facts and theories. His stories 
were specially delightful, because they were told so appo- 

* To qviote the many voices as they spc.ik of him is to quote the voices ot .1 whole 
host of friends .ind followers in the spirit or the letter. Ciuided by Mr rurnival I have 
re.id a cycle of commentaries, anions which 1 should like to mention two articles in the 
yi~:v!s/i Qititrterly Rn'iniK which seem to me specially intercstini;. " Hrownins is a 
poet for the old as well as for the younjr. Some poets write of suninier, others of 
spring. Browning belongs even more to wintry times, or to the early silent months 
which precede tlie spring. The branches of the trees n\ay be dry and fivzen. but in 
them lies the sap of hope and life, the frost-bound earth contains the harvests of the 
year, its jovs and fragrance and sweetness to be. Who more than Hrowning has ever 
made us realise that life which exists alongside with death, that truth and law which 
underlies confusion. " I pix'ss God's lamp close to my breast, its splendor soon or late 
will pierce the gloom.' " Sir James Kit/. James Stephen, in his " Kss.iy on Hooker," 
quotes a passage which might almost serve for a motto to some of Browning's finest 
work. " In all created and imperfect beings there is an appetite and desire whereby 
they incline to something which they may be, which as yet they are not in act 

" ' So in man's life arise 
August anticipations, symbols, types 
Of a dim splendor ever on before. 
In that eternal circle life pursues.'" — PAii.\CELSi's. 

.And again, " That which doth assign to each thing the kind, that which doth moderate 
the force and power, that which doth appoint the forn\ and measure of working, the 
same we term a l.iw." Again hear Paracelsus : 

" But thou shalt painfully attain to joy 
W'lule hope and fear and love shall keep thee man," 
16S 



sitely, and were so simple and complete in themselves. A 
do;:^^erel always had a curious fascination for him, and he 
preferred to quote the very worst poetry in his talks. On 
one occasion we were dining at Mr. and Mrs. Lehmann's 
house in Half- moon Street; it was a cottage of delight 
rather than a palace, and the guests were somewhat crowd- 
ed. Millais, turning round, happened to brush off the head 
of a flower that lirowning wore in his button-hole. Concern- 
ing the said flower, the poet immediately remembered a story 
of a city clerk who had considered himself inspired, and had 
some of his verses printed. ()nt poem began something 
like this : 

" I love the gentle primrose 
That grows beside the rill ; 
I love the water-lily, 
Narcissus, and jonquil." 

This last word was by mistake printed "John Quill," which 
seemed so appropriate a name, anfl the clerk got so much 
chaffed about it, that liis poetical inspirations were nipped 
in the bud, and he printed no more poems. 

Another reminiscence which my friend Mrs. C also 

recalls is in a sadder strain. It was a description of some- 
thing Mr. lirowning once saw in Italy. It happened at 
Arezzo, where he harl turned by chance into an old church 
among the many old churches there, that he saw a crowd of 
people at the end of an aisle, and found they were looking 
at the skeleton of a man just discovered by some workmen 
who were breaking away a portion of the wall opposite the 
high altar. The flesh was like brown leather, but the feat- 
ures were distinguishable. Mr. lirowning made inquiries 
as to who it was. He could hear of no tradition even of a 
man being walled up. The priests thought it must have 
been drjne three or four hundred years ago. A hole had 

169 



been left above his head to enable him to breathe. Mr. 
Browning said the dead man was standing with his hands 
crossed upon his breast ; on the face was a look of expecta- 
tion, an expression of hoping against hope. The man 
looked up, knowing help could only come from above, and 

must have died still hoping. Mrs. C said to Mr. 

Browning she wondered he had not written a poem about 
it. He replied he had done so, and had given it away. 

I often find myself going back to Darwin's saying about 
the duration of a man's friendships being one of the best 
measures of his worth, and Browning's friendships are very 
characteristic and convincing. He specially loved Landor, 
to whom he and his wife were Good Samaritans indeed. 
For the Tennysons his was also a real and warm affection. 
Was there ever a happier, truer dedication than that of his 
collected selections "i — 

"TO ALFRED TENNYSON: 
" In poetry illustrious and consummate. In friendship noble and 
sincere !" 

How enduring was his friendship for Mr. Procter, and how 
often has his faithful coming cheered the dear and kind 
old man ! Of his feeling for Mr. Milsand I have already 
spoken. Among the women who were Mr. Browning's real 
and confidential friends there is the same feeling of trust 
and dependence. '70 



VIII 

Besides actual personal feelings, there are also the Affini- 
ties of a life to be taken into account. The following pas- 
sages, which I owe to Professor Knight's kindness, are very 
remarkable, for they show what Browning's estimation was 
of Wordsworth, and although they were not written till much 
later, I give them here. Indeed, the point of meeting of 
these two beneficent poet streams is one full of interest to 
those upon the shore. The first paragraph of the first letter 
relates to some new honors and dignities gratefully and 
firmly declined : 

" March 2ist,'iT,. 

''I do feel increasingly (cowardly as seems the avowal) the need of 
keeping the quiet corner in the world's van which I have got used to for 
so many years. 

" I will, as you desire, attempt to pick out the twenty poems which 
strike me (and so as to take away my breath) as those worthiest of the 
master Wordsworth. 

"Speaking of a classification of Wordsworth's poems, in my heart 
I fear I should do it almost chronologically, so immeasurably superior 
seem to me the first sprightly runnings ; your selection would appear 
to be excellent, and the partial admittance of the latter work prevents 
one from observing the too definitely distinguishing black line between 
supremely good and— well ! what is fairly tolerable from Wordsworth 
always understand." 

At the end of the letters addressed to Professor Knight 
there is this touching postscript : 



"I open the envelope to say — what I had nearly omitted — that Ld. 
Coleridge proposed, and my humble self — at his desire — seconded you, 
last evening, for admission to the Athenceum. I had the less scruple 
in offering my services that you will most likely never see in the offer 
anything but a record of my respect and regard, since your election 
will come on when I shall be — dare I hope ? — ' elect ' in even a higher 
society !" 

Here is another letter also relating to Wordsworth : 

" 19 Warwick Crescent, \V., 
February 24, 'S6. 

" My dear Professor, — I have kept you waiting this long wliile — 
and for how shabby a result ! Vou must listen indulgently while I at- 
tempt to explain why I api forced to disappoint you. One remembers 
few more commonplace admonitions to a poet than that ' he would 
wiselier have written but a quarter of the works which he has labored 
at for a lifetime,' unless it be this other, often coupled with it, ' that 
such works ought to be addressed to the general apprehension, not ex- 
clusively suited to the requirements of a (probably quite imaginary) few.' 
Each precept contradicts the other. Write, on set purpose, for the many, 
and you will soon enough be reminded of the old ' Tot homines ;' and 
write as conscientiously for the few — your idealized ' Double ' (it comes 
to that) — and you may soon suit him with the extremely little that suits 
yourself. Now in view of which of these objects should the maker of a 
selection of the works of any poet worth the pains begin his employment ? 

■' I have myself attempted the business, and know something of the 
achievements in this kind of my betters. They furnish a list of the 
pieces which the selector has found most delight in. And I lia\e found 
also, that others, playing the selector with apparently as good a right 
and reason, were dissatisfied with this unaccountable addition, and that 
as inexplicable omission ; in short, that the sole selector was not himself. 
The only case in which no such stumbling-block occurs being that obvi- 
ous one — if it has ever occurred — when a public, wholly unacquainted 
with an author, is presumed to be accessible to a specirrien of his alto- 
gether untried productions — for, by chance, the sample of the poetry of 
Brown and Jones may pierce the ignorance of somebody — say of Rob- 
inson. It is quite another matter of interest to know what Matthew 
Arnold tliinks most worthy in Wordsworth. But should anybody have 

172 



curiosity to inquire which ' fifteen or twenty' of his poems have most 
thoroughly impressed such a one as myself, all I can affirm is that I 
treasure as precious every poem written during about the first twenty 
years of the poet's life ; after these, the solution grows weaker, the crys- 
tals gleam more rarely, and the assiduous stirring up of the mixture is 
too apparent and obtrusive. To the end crystals are to be come at ; 
but my own experience resembles that of the old man in the admirable 
■ Resolution and Independence :' 

'"Once I could meet with them on every side, 
But they have dwindled long by slow decay, 
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may ' 

— that is, in the poet's whole Vork, which I should leave to operate in 
the world as it may, each recipient his own selector. 

" I only find room to say that I was delighted to make acquaintance 
with your daughter, and that should she feel any desire to make that of 
my sister, we shall welcome her gladly. 

" Believe me, my dear Professor, 

" Yours most truly, 

" Robert Browning." 



IX 



We were all living in "sea-coast-nook-full " Normandy 
one year, scattered into various chateaus and shops and tene- 
ments. Some of our party were installed in a clematis- 
wreathed mansion near the church - tower ; others were at 
the milk -woman's on the road to the sea. Most of the 
lively population of the little watering-place was stowed 
away in chalets of which the fronts seemed wide open to the 
road from morning to night; numbers of people content- 
edly spent whole days in tents on the sea-shore. It was a 
fine hot summer, with sweetness and completeness every- 
where ; the cornfields gilt and far -stretching, the waters 
blue, the skies arching high and clear, and the sunsets suc- 

173 



ceeding each other, in most glorious light and beauty. Mr. 
Milsand had a little country lodge at St. Aubin, near Luc- 
sur-Mer, and I wrote to him from the shady court-yard of 
our chateau, and begged him to come over and see us ; and 
when he came he told us Mr. and Miss Browning were 
also living close by. We were walking along the dusty road 
and passing the old square tower when he suddenly stood 
still, and, fixing his earnest look upon me, said : 

" Tell me, why is there some reserve ; is anything wrong 
between you and Robert Browning ,'' I see you are re- 
served ; I see he is also constrained ; what is it ?" 

To which I replied, honestly enough, that I did not know 
what it was; there 7e>as some constraint between me and 
my old friend. I imagined that some one had made mis- 
chief; I could see plainly enough when we met that he was 
changed and vexed and hurt, but I could not tell why, and 
it certainly made me very unhappy. " But this must not be," 
said Milsand; "this must be cleared." I said it was hope- 
less ; it had lasted for months, and in those days I was still 
young enough to imagine that a mood was eternal; that 
coldness could never change. Now I find it almost impos- 
sible to give that consideration to a quarrel which is inva- 
riably claimed under such circumstances. 

I happened to be alone next day ; the cousins and the 
children who were with me had gone down to the sea. I 

was keeping house in the blazing heat with F (the 

family despot, the late nurse and present house-keeper of 
the party). The shutters were closed against the blinding 
light ; I was writing in my bedroom, with a pleasant sense 
of temporary solitude and silence, when I chanced to go 
to the window, and looked into the old walled court. I saw 
the great gates open a little way, and a man's broad-shoul- 
dered figure coming through them, and then advance, strid- 
ing across the stones, towards the house, ^ It was Mr. 

174 



Browning, dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella 
under his arm. It was the poet himself, and over and 
beyond this, it was my kind, old friend returned, all reserve 
and coldness gone, never to trouble or perplex again. We 
had no explanations. 

" Don't ask," he said ; " the facts are not worth remem- 
bering or inquiring into ; people make mischief without, 
even meaning it. It is all over now. I have come to ask 
when you will come to St. Aubin ; my sister is away for a 
few days, but the Milsands are counting on you." 

We started almost tht; next day in a rattle-trap chaise, 
with an escort of donkeys ridden by nephews and nieces, 
along the glaring sandy road to Luc. The plains were 
burning hot and the sea seemed on fire, but the children 
and donkeys kept up valiantly. At last we reached a little 
village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-Mer, and in the street 
stood Monsieur Milsand, in front of a tiny house. How 
kind was his greeting ! How cordial was that of his wife 
and daughter, coming to the door to make us welcome! 
Mr, Browning was also waiting in the diminutive sitting- 
room, where I remember a glimpse of big books and com- 
fortable seats and tables. The feast itself was spread out- 
of-doors on the terrace at the back, with a shady view of 
the sea between lilac-bushes ; the low table was laid with 
dainties, glasses, and quaint decanters. Mr. Milsand was 
the owner of vineyards in the South, and abstemious though 
he was himself, he gave his triends the best of good wine, 
as well as of words and welcome. From this by-gone and 
happy feast two dishes are still present to my mind: a cer- 
tain capon and a huge fish, lying in a country platter, curled 
on a bed of fennel, surrounded by a wreath of marigolds, 
and in its mouth a bunch of fiowers. The host helped us 
each in turn ; the Normandy maid appeared and disappeared 
with her gleaming gold ear-rings ; then came a pause, dur- 

'7S 



ing which Madame Milsand rose quietly, and went into the 
house. The gentlemen were talking pleasantly, and the 
ladies listening agreeably (there are many local politics to 
be discussed on the Normandy coast). But somehow, after 
a time, the voices ceased, and in the silence we heard the 
strains of distant martial music. Mr. Milsand looked in- 
quiringly at his daughter. 

" It is the regiment marching by," said Mile. Milsand. 

"But where is my wife.'"' said Monsieur Milsand. ^^ She 
cannot have gone to the review." 

Still the music sounded ; still we waited. Then to us re- 
turned our handsome, dignified hostess. " She had not been 
to the review," she said, laughing and apologizing; "but, 
ladies and gentlemen," she added, "you must please con- 
tent yourselves with your fricandeau, for, alas ! there is no 
news of my larded capon. It went to the pastry-cook's to 
be roasted ; I have just sent the maid to inquire ; it was 
despatched, ready for the table, half an hour ago, on a tray 
carried by the pastry-cook's boy. It is feared that it is 
running after the soldiers. I am in despair at your meagre 
luncheon." 

But I need not say we were in a land flowing with milk 
and honey. As we feasted on, as the last biscuit was crum- 
bled, the last fragrant cup of coffee handed round, once 
more came the Normandy ear-rings. 

" Shall I serve the capon, madame .' Pierre has just re- 
turned from the review." 

But we all cried out that we must come back another day 
to eat the capon. The sun was getting low. If we carried 
out our intention of walking to St. Aubin and seeing Mr. 
Browning's cottage, we must start forthwith. 

The path ran along the high cliff. Mr. Browning went 

before us, leadmg the way to " mine own hired house." 

Once more the whole scene comes before me : the sea- 

176 



coast far below our feet, the arid vegetation of the sandy 
way, the rank, yellow snap-dragons lining the paths. There 
was not much other color ; the tones were delicate, half 
airy, half solid ; the sea was in a vast circle around us ; 
the waves were flowing into the scooped sandy bay of Luc- 
sur-Mer ; the rocks of the Calvados were hidden behind the 
jutting promontories ; here and there a rare poppy, like a 
godsend, shone up by chance. It took us half an hour's 
quick walk to reach the two little straight sentry-boxes 
standing on the cliffs against the sky, to which Mr. Brown- 
ing pointed. He himself has described this habitation in 
" Red Cotton Nightcap Country :" 

" That just behind you is mine own hired house, 
With right of pathway tlirough the field in front. 
No prejudice to all its growth unsheath'd 
Of emerald Luzern bursting into blue. . . . 
Be sure I keep the path that hugs the wall 
Of mornings, as I pad from door to gate ! 
Yon yellow — what if not wild-mustard flower? 
Of that my naked sole makes lawful prize, 
Bruising the acrid aromatics out . . . 
And lo, the wave protrudes a lip at last, 
And flecks my foot with froth, nor tempts in vain." 

We entered the Brownings' house. The sitting-room 
door opened to the garden and the sea beyond— a fresh- 
swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon 
the table. Mr. Browning told us it was the only book he 
had with him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting- 
room, but I remember a little dumb piano standing in a 
corner, on which he used to practise in the early morning. 
I heard Mr. Browning declaring they were perfectly satisfied 
with their little house. That his brains, squeezed as dry as 
a sponge, were only ready for fresh air. 

But has not Browning himself best summed up the con- 



trast between the meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-place 
and London, where 

" JVIy toe trespassed upon your flounce, 
Small blame unto you, seeing the staircase party in the square 
Was small and early, and you broke no rib." 



X 



This visit to St. Aubin was followed by the publication 
of " Red Cotton Nightcap Country," from which I have been 
quoting, and on this occasion I must break my rule, and 
trench upon the ground traversed by Mrs. Orr. I cannot 
give myself greater pleasure than by inserting the following 
passage from the Life : 

" The August of 1S72 and of 1S73 again found him and his sister at 
St. Aubin, and the earlier visit was an important one, since it supplied 
him with the materials of his next work, of which Miss Annie Thack- 
eray, there also for a few days, suggested the title. The tragic drama 
which forms the subject of Mr. Browning's poem had been in great part 
nacted in the vicinity of St. Aubin, and the case of disputed inheritance 
to which it had given rise was pending at that moment in the tribunals 
of Caen. The prevailing impression left on Miss Thackeray's mind by 
this primitive district was, she declared, that of white cotton nightcaps 
(the habitual head-gear of the Normandy peasants). She engaged to 
write a story called 'White Cotton Nightcap Country,' and Mr. Brown- 
ing's quick sense of both contrast and analogy inspired the introduction 
of this element of repose into his own picture of that peaceful, prosaic 
existence, and of the ghostly, spiritual conflict to which it had served as 
background." 

And perhaps the writer may be excused for adding a 
letter which concerns the dedication of " Red Q^otton Night- 

178 



fr. f^ ( 




1 ?■ ^ I *^ 





cap Country" — a very unexpected and delightful conse- 
quence of our friendly meeting : 

"May 9, 1873. 

" Dear Miss Thackeray, — Indeed the only sort of pain that any 
sort of criticism could give me would be by the reflection of any particle 
of pain it managed to gWQ yoti. I dare say that, by long use, I don't 
feel or attempt to feel criticisms of this kind, as most people might. 
Remember that everybody this thirty years has given me his kick and 
gone his way, just as I am told the understood duty of all highway trav- 
ellers in Spain is to bestow at least one friendly thump for the Mayoral's 
sake on his horses as they toil along up-hill, 'so utterly a puzzle,' ' or- 
gan-grinding,' and so forth, come and go again without much notice ; but 
any poke at me which would touch you, would vex me indeed ; there- 
fore pray don't let my critics into that secret ! Indeed, / thought the 
article highly complimentary, which comes of being in the category cel- 
ebrated by Butler : 

" ' Some have been kicked till they know [not] whether 
The shoe be Spanish or neat's leather.' 

"You see the little patch of velvet in the toe-piece of this slipper 
seemed to tickle by comparison. Ever yours affectionately, 

"Robert Browning." 

But, whatever the past may have contained, Mr. Browning 
had little to complain of in his future critics. This is not 
an unappreciative age ; the only fault to be found with it is 
that there are too many mouths using the same words over 
and over again, until the expressions seem to lose their 
senses and fly about almost giddily and at hap-hazard. The 
extraordinary publicity in which our bodies live seems to 
frighten away our souls at times ; we are apt to stick to 
generalities, or to well -hackneyed adjectives which have 
ceased to have much meaning or responsibility, or if we 
try to describe our own feelings, it is in terms which some- 
times grow more and more emphatic as they are less and 
less to the point. When we come to say what is our simple 



and genuine conviction, the effort is almost beyond us. We 
remember so many cle\er confusing things that other people 
have said. The truth is too Hke Cordelia's. To say that you 
have loved a man or a woman, that you admire them and 
delight in their work, docs not any longer mean to vou or 
to others what it means in fact. It seems almost a test of 
Mr. Browning's true greatness that the love and the trust in 
his genius have survived the things which have been said 
about it. 



XI 



Not the least interesting part of the Milsand correspond- 
ence relates to the MSS. which the cultivated Frenchman 
now regularly revised for his English friend before thev 
were sent to the printer. Here is a letter to Mr. Milsand. 
dated May, 1S72 : "Whenever you get the whole series," 
Browning says, "you will see what I f'ail to make you un- 
derstand, how ifhstinurb/e your assistance has been ; there is 
not one point to which you called attention which I was not 
thereby enabled to improve, in some cases essentially ben- 
efit ; the punctuation was nearly as useful as the other ap- 
parently more important assistance. The fact is that in the 
case of a writer with my peculiarities and habits, somebody 
quite ignorant of what I may have meant to write, and only 
occupied with what is really written, is needed to supervise 
the thing produced, and I never hoped or dreamed that I 
should find such intelligence as yours at my service. 1 
won't attempt to thank you, dearest friend, but simply in 
my own interest do not you undervalue your service to me, 
because in logical consequence the next step ought to be 
that you abate it or withdraw it." In another tetter, dated 

1S3 



FAC-SIMILE OP MRS, nROWNINr;'S HANlJWRITINO 



i87Sj Mr. Browning writes again about punctuation. " Your 
way of punctuation (French way) is different from ours — I 
don't know why; we use-:-where you prefer-;- but I have 
Frenchified myself in this respect'for your sake." " I know 
how I trouble all but your goodness," he repeats to his 
friend. Is it not a pleasure to think of the records in the 
old carved house at Dijon ; of the good service rendered, 
and so generously acknowledged .'' 

Here is one more extract from the Dijon correspondence, 
dated April 7, 1878 : "J ^^ g^^d )'ou like the poems. The 
measures were hitherto unused by me. That of the first 
poems is 



and the caesura falls just as you say, and should, as a rule, 
be strictly observed, but to prevent monotony, I occasion- 
ally break it." This letter concludes by an allusion to a 
French friend who is learning English, and speaking of the 
difficulties of a foreign tongue, Mr. Browning says: "The 
thoughts outstrip and leave behind the words ; in the slow- 
er process of Avriting, the thought is compelled to wait, and 
get itself suited in a phrase." "Now for yourself," he con- 
cludes, " I enjoy altogether your enjoyment of Bebe, and 
wish that grand'mbre may be tyrannized over more and 
more Turkishly. It is the good time. Give my true love 
to whoever will take it of your joyous party. Sarianna 
writes often, I know. We hail the announcement of your 
speedy arrival as ever." 

The house by the water-side, in Warwick Crescent, which 
Browning hastily took, and in which he lived for so many 
years after his return to England, was a very charming cor- 
ner, I used to think. It was London, but London touched 
by some indefinite romance ; the canal used to look cool 

iSs 



and deep, the green trees used to shade the crescent ; it 
seemed a peaceful oasis after crossing that dreary ,-EoHa of 
Paddington, with its many despairing shrieks and whirhng 
eddies. The house was an ordinary London house, but the 
carved oak furniture and tapestries gave dignity to the long 
drawing-rooms, and pictures and books lined the stairs. 
In the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of which I am 
writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings 
and long throats, who used to come to meet their master 
hissing and fluttering. When I said I liked the place, he 
told us of some visitor from abroad, who had lately come to 
see him, who also liked Warwick Crescent, and who, look- 
ing up and down the long row of houses and porticos in 
front of the canal, said, "Why, this is a mansion, sir; do 
you inhabit the whole of this great building, and do you al- 
low the public to sail upon the water ?" 

As we sat at luncheon I looked up and down the room, 
with its comfortable lining of books, and also I could not 
help noticing the chimney- board heaped with invitations. 
I never saw so many cards in my life before. Lothair him- 
self might have wondered at them. 

Mr. Browning talked on, not of the present London, but 
of Italy and vi/leggiiitura, with his friends, the Storys ; of 
Siena days and of Walter Savage Landor. He told us the 
piteous story of the old man wandering forlorn down the 
street in the sunshine without a hole to hide his head. 
He kindled at the remembrance of the old poet, of whom 
he said his was the most remarkable personality he had 
ever known ; and then, getting up abruptly from the table, 
he reached down some of Landor's many books from the 
shelves near the fireplace, declaring he knew no finer reading. 

He read us some extracts from the " Conversations with 
the Dead," quickly turning over the leaves, seeking for his 
favorite passages. 



There is a little anecdote which I think he also told us on 
this occasion. It concerned a ring which he used to wear, 
and which had belonged to his wife. One day in the 
Strand he discovered that the intaglio from the setting was 
missing. People were crowding in and out, there seemed 
no chance of recovering; but all the same he retraced his 
steps, and lo ! in the centre of the crossing, there lay the 
jewel on a stone, shining in the sun. He had lost the ring 
on a previous occasion in Florence and found it there by 
another happy chance. «. 



XII 



It was not until 1887 that Mr. Browning moved to De 
Vere Gardens, where I saw him almost for the last time. 
I remember calling there at an early hour with my children. 
The servant hesitated about letting us in. Kind Miss 
Browning came out to speak to us, and would not hear of 
us going away. 

" Wait a few minutes. I know he will see you," she said. 
'' Come in. Not into the dining-room ; there are some ladies 
waiting there ; and there are some members of the Brown- 
ing Society in the drawing-room. Robert is in the study, 
with some Americans who have come by appointment. 
Here is my sitting-room," she said; "he will come to you 
directly." 

We had not waited five minutes, when the door opened 
wide, and Mr. Browning came in. Alas ! it was no longer 
the stalwart visitor from St. Aubin. He seemed tired, hur- 
ried, though not less outcoming and cordial, in his silver age. 

" Well, what can I do for you .?" he said, dropping into a 
chair, and holding out both his hands. 

.87 



I told him it was a family festival, and that I had "brought 
the children to ask for his blessing." 

'• Is that all ?" he said, laughing, with a kind look, not 
without some relief. He also hospitably detained us. and 
when his American visitors were gone, took us in turn up 
into his study, where the carved writing-tables were covered 
with letters — a milky way of letters, it seemed to me, flow- 
ing in from every direction. 

" What ! all this to answer }" I exclaimed. 

"You can have no conception what it is," he replied. " I 
am quite worn out with writing letters by the time I begin 
my day's work." 

But his day's w^ork was ending here. In the autumn of 
the year 18S9 he went to Italy, and from Asolo wrote a 
happy and delightful letter to his brother-in-law, Mr. George 
Barrett, describing the "ancient city older than Rome," 
the immense indescribable charm of the surrounding coun- 
try — the Alps on one side, the Asolan Mountains all round, 
and opposite the vast Lombard Plains. ..." We think of 
leaving in a week or two," so he says, for Venice — guests 
of Pen and his wife. He writes of his children, and of his 
and his sister's happiness in their beautiful home, and also 
of the new edition of the works of " E. B. B." He seemed 
well when he first reached Venice, but it was winter even 
in Venice, Mrs. Orr says, and taking his usual walk on the 
Lido he caught cold. Attacks of faintness set in, and two 
hours before midnight on Thursday, December 12th, he 
breathed his last, closing his eyes in his son's beautiful home 
at Venice among those he loved best. His son, his sister, 
his daughter-in-law, were round about his bed tending and 
watching to the last. When all was over, they brought him 
home to England to rest. 

When Spenser died in the street in Westminster, in which 

18S 



he dwelt after his home in Ireland was burned and his child 
was killed by the rebels, it is said, that after lingering in this 
world in poverty and neglect, he was carried to the grave in 
state, and that his sorrowing brother-poets came and stood 
round about his grave, and each in turn Hung in an ode to 
his memory, together with the pen with which it had been 
written. The present Dean of Westminster, quoting this 
story, added that probably Shakespeare had stood by the 
grave with the rest of them, and that Shakespeare's own 
pen might still be lying-in dust in the vaults of the old ab- 
bey. There is something in the story very striking to the 
imagination. One pictures to one's self the gathering of 
those noble dignified men of the Elizabethan age, whose 
thoughts were at once so strong and so gentle, so fierce and 
so tender, whose dress was so elaborate and stately. Per- 
haps in years to come people may imagine to themselves 
the men who stood only the other day round Robert Brown- 
ing's grave, the friends who loved him, the writers who have 
written their last tribute to this great and generous poet. 
There are still some eagles' quills among us ; there are 
others of us who have not eagles' quills to dedicate to his 
memory, only nibs with which to pen a feeling, happily 
stronger and more various than tiie words and scratches 
which try to speak of it : a feeling common to all who knew 
him, and who loved the man of rock and sunshine, and who 
were jDroud of his great gift of spirit and of his noble human 
nature. 

It often happens when a man dies in the fulness of years, 
that as you look across his grave, you can almost see his life- 
time written in the faces gathered round about it. There 
stands his history. There are his companions and his early 
associates and those who loved him, and those with whom 
his later life was passed. You may hear the voices that have 
greeted him, see the faces he last looked upon ; you may 

189 



even go back and tincl some impression of early youtli in 
the young folks who recall a past generation to those who 
remember the past. And how many phases of a long and 
varied life must have been represented in the great proces- 
sion which followed Robert Browning to his honored grave! 
passing along the London streets and moving on through 
the gloomy fog, assembling from many a distant place to 
show respect to one 

"Who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break ; 
Never dreamed, the' right were worsted, 
Wrong would triumph. 

Held — we fall to rise, are bafHed to fight better, 
Sleep to wake." 



THE END 



SOME LITERARY BIOGRAPHIES. 



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